Why A Good Design Is So Important For Your Business

Small and Medium-Sized Companies Frequently Have Tight Budgets.

Alas, many small businesses do not comprehend the relevance of design, so they often cut corners to save room in their budget for other regions i.e. locate some inexpensive high school or collage student to manage their web site or logo design or even simply do it themselves rather than hire a professional.

That’s a mistake.

SimpleReach Chief Design Officer Andrea Mignolo gave a talk on this very subject at the 2015 Future of Web Design seminar, emphasizing the business advantages of good design. To demonstrate her point she brought up the narrative of Harvey Earl.

This was back in the 1920’s, long before companies like Apple establishing scrupulous attention to style could enable executives to establish an empire. At the time, the leading players in the car industry considered good engineering was what sold their products; focusing on the authentic look of the car was viewed as flamboyant and unneeded.

Earl was hired because GM had a difficulty that engineering alone seemed unable to repair – the luxury car market was formerly dominated by them, but Ford and Chrysler were beginning to siphon customers away.

“So this man Alfred Sloan started doing some business-y evaluation of the situation,” Mignolo described. “At this stage, automobiles had all become commoditized, so there clearly was no differentiation that was really going to take place through engineering. He began to think about it more and he realized they wanted something to distinguish the car, and he realized it was really going to be appearance and fashion.”

Sloan’s realization that appearance is important led him to hire Earl, whose first job was designing the LaSelle, which was a huge success. The LaSelle was in fact so successful that Sloan created a brand new division of GM for Earl to lead, the Art and Color Section. Even then, many higher ups at GM disparaged Earl and referred to the Art and Color Section as the “Beauty Parlor” and those that worked in it as the “pretty picture boys”, but Sloan had demonstrated his point – more attention to design ends in more sales.

Design is truly one that can help you win customers over competitors that aren’t unable to stand out from the pack, a differentiator. There are principles that you should bear in mind, while you are able to get some great results from firms out there such as Paducah web design agencies. Here are a few more unique ways in which an emphasis on design will benefit your company:

Decrease Your Bounce Rate

First things first – What the heck is a bounce rate? ( in case you already know, feel free to skip the following paragraph.)

Well, enable us define the term for you: the bounce rate of your website is the portion of people that leave after only visiting one page.

Based on a Neilson Norman Group study, individuals are only going to spend an average of 10 – 20 seconds on your site till they decide whether it’s worth their time or not. To put it differently, if they can not locate what they are looking for instantly, they’re going to get back out and locate a site that is easier to browse (one of your competitor’s websites).

It’s hard enough to get an expected customer on your website, given how your opponents are all striving to do the same. Great design will convince the visitors you do land to stay in your web site.

Enhance Your Search Rankings

Phone books are simply oversized paperweights at this point – that is to say, they don’t matter.

What does matter is your search rankings… people don’t use phone books anymore because they can only find they’re what they’re looking for through Google instead.

You can probably see we are going here – that Google and several other search engines are individuals associate with businesses, it is all-important for your organization to be featured prominently in those search results. Good layout will help you here.

Where is a bit of a mystery, all the specifics of how search websites discover which sites get put, but we do know a many things that definitely have an effect.

For one, the longer people stay on your own site, the better. And, as we only learned, good design will help to keep folks on your site. That enhances your search positions, which subsequently results in more sales.

Look Professional

Your reputation isn’t something you can put a price tag on, but it’s certainly vital to the success of your company.

How good your website is designed might not appear like that big of a deal, it is, since the quality of your website reflects on the characteristic of your organization as a whole.

Where else might you be cutting corners, should you cut corners in your logo or your website? Perhaps your goods and services are low-quality as well… even if customers do not think this outright, they may feel so subconsciously.

You Don’t Have to Take Our Word for It

“People have [feelings] about your business based on the experiences they have had with a brand,” says Adriana Marin, a graphic designer at Stuttershock. “A well-designed logo and site inspires confidence for the reason that it seems professional. If a company is prepared to concentrate on developing a clean and practical layout that’s user-friendly, then that could be an index of what using their product might be like.”

The Great Differentiator

Let us return to Andrea Mignolo’s narrative about Alfred Sloan and Harvey Earl and the success of the LaSalle – the lesson of that story was that paying attention to design can get you to stand out from the competition and attract new customers.

That lesson applies to much more than just the automobile industry. No matter what it is that you do, whether you cut hair or anything else or sell coffee, you likely have competitions that do that same thing that you do, fighting for the very same pool of potential customers that you need to survive. You can’t succeed without standing out. Design will help you do just that.

So, paying a lot more attention to design results in lower bounce rates, better search rankings, a more professional look, as well as a competitive advantage over similar companies locally. Any business owner that does not believe design is significant is doing themselves a great disservice.