The Difference in Design

One time, I went to try a new restaurant because I was feeling adventurous and was pretty sick of all my usual places. As soon as I stepped through the door of this restaurant, I knew something wasn’t right. The floors had visible dirt on them, tables full of used dishes, and the staff was a little too nonchalant about the way they were handling the food. It took me all of 30 seconds to look around, make my evaluation, and decide I should go somewhere else that I could trust.

In only 30 seconds, your customers are making judgements about you too, but they’re not looking at a dirty floor – they’re looking at your website. A hard-to-read website full of information and poor navigation can confuse your clients, leaving you without a sale. The good news: this is easily fixable. A quick clean up of your website follows three simple steps:

1. Assess: Look at your current website as if you’re seeing it for the first time. Do you feel informed or confused? Does the navigation make sense? If you have any doubts about the effectiveness of your site, there might be alterations that need to be made.

2. Clean: Take out the long paragraphs of information, useless graphics, and distracting pop-ups. Go back to the basics of your company. Your customers are there to learn the details about your organization to decide if you are a good investment. Help them understand what you can do for them.

3. Update: As your company continues to grow and adapt, your website should mirror those changes. An outdated website is a quick way to bore your potential clients into clicking over you and moving onto the next company who can give them similar services.

This company’s website redesign made their information much easier to access and understand:

Ensuring that both the navigation and information in your website makes sense to your consumers is the most important aspect of web design. It is essentially the first impression that possible clients will get from you, and you want it to be a good one. Also, making improvements and updates to your website can help improve your SEO, and who doesn’t want that?

When you walk into a new restaurant, you want to see a clean environment because that makes you more trustworthy of their food. When a future client comes to your website, they expect the same thing, just not with food, but with your products. They do not want to see clutter or useless details; they want the information that will explain why your company is the best option for them. So don’t make them dig for it, serve it on a silver platter.