One of the most important aspects of a brand’s online presence is its website. A brand’s website serves as a storefront that attracts and retains customers, especially in an era when digitalisation is booming and consumers are shopping online more frequently than ever. Proper web design and development can help you reach more potential customers online while influencing how the audience perceives your brand.
Here are some important skills you need to have in order to successfully create an effective website that strengthens your online presence.
1. Visual Design
Humans are highly visual creatures who have learnt to interact with the world around us through visual cues and respond effectively to visual information.
An effective web design relies heavily on the way visual information is presented. This is why visual design is important. It involves tying together elements and colours to either communicate the right idea or elicit an emotion from the visitor, which may lead to an action, such as a purchase.
The level of visual appeal in a website can have a significant impact on how the visitor perceives the brand, it can even improve the browsing experience.
2. User Experience and User Interface
Everything on the internet revolves around the user experience. It is important because it assists in fulfilling a user’s needs and provides positive experiences that can improve brand loyalty. Additionally, user experience enables you to clearly define customer journeys in order to make improvements to your marketing efforts, which can lead to business success.
Web design and development involves fine-tuning the user interface to improve user experience, which is heavily influenced by the website’s layout, text, image, and button placement. An uncluttered website design that is logically laid out and capable of reacting accordingly to a visitor’s clicks improves online interaction and user experience.
If a brand can’t provide its audience with a positive website navigation experience, it will likely lose out to competitors and fail to attract or retain customers.
3. Building Blocks of the Web
HTML, CSS, and Javascript are the most commonly used languages in web design and development. They collaborate to create a functional website by focusing on different aspects of web development.
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, which is the language used to create detailed instructions concerning the style, type, format and structure of a website before it is rendered.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which is a design language that works alongside HTML to improve the appearance of a website.
Javascript is a programming language that handles a website’s interactive components and allows you to program and control how individual elements on the website responds when a click occurs.
These are important languages that one will need to be proficient in should you want to develop your own website from scratch.
Beyond aesthetics, website design is also about the user experience (UX). One way to enhance UX lies in multimedia content. Multimedia content is the use of multiple media such as videos, text infographics and images in one place. A strong multimedia strategy helps to effectively and efficiently reach your target audience. It is the perfect way to synergise a text-heavy content mix, allowing you to communicate your message visually, enliven your brand, create dynamism, and increase social sharing and traffic. Furthermore, multimedia content can also help to attract more links to your site, which is helpful for building your online presence.
Important Soft Skills
1. Creativity
As mentioned before, visual design is essential in web design and development. This means that you need to be creative and have an eye for aesthetics in order to create beautiful, unique web pages.
A simple layout with plain buttons may work well for corporate websites but if you kick it up a notch with interesting elements that are rarely seen on websites, you may be able to capture the attention of a larger audience.
2. Attention to Detail
Web design and development requires meticulous attention to detail because you must ensure that every single button on your website reacts and functions as intended. Any element that is missing can cause issues with the user interface and experience, which will affect how others perceive your brand.
3. Critical Thinking Skills
From the moment a visitor clicks into your website to the moment he or she closes the web browser, every interaction with your website has to be considered. These are touchpoints that can influence a potential customer’s impression of your brand and affect the customer journey. This is why it is important to have critical thinking skills that allow you to make important decisions regarding your website that can help improve user experience and even keep users engaged.
Web design and development is a complicated process that takes a lot of effort and requires a ton of knowledge. Instead of sweating it out yourself, why not engage the services of a professional web designer and developer to successfully create your own functional website?
eFusion Technology is a Singapore-based company that specialises in web design, eCommerce website development, and content management systems. Effectively communicate your brand and stand out from the rest of your competitors today. Contact us for more information.
