If your business doesn’t have its own professionally designed website yet, you’re sorely missing out. These days, even brick-and-mortar retail stores need to have an attractive website. It’s how people find you, check out your products and determine why they should choose you instead of a competing business.

In a way, your website is your business’s internet sales representative. If you don’t have a presence online, you may be losing countless potential customers every day. People simply won’t find you, and they’ll choose the other businesses that do have a website.

It’s important to know that designing a free website on some hosting service or blog site such as WordPress doesn’t count. Free sites made with templates are sorely lacking in features, and even worse, Google tends to ignore them completely in search results. To stand out online, you need professional web design.

How Often Do Companies Need to Update Their Websites?

What if you already have a website, but it’s been a long time since it’s been refreshed or revamped? If you’re going on ten years or more, it’s time for some changes. Not only have today’s consumer habits changed a lot in the last 10 years but so have Google’s search algorithms.

As an example, 10 years ago, choosing the right keywords and optimizing web pages for these keywords was one of the most important factors for obtaining page visits. Now, things have changed.

Search engine optimization still matters, but it’s only a small part of a successful online strategy. Today’s businesses get ahead by offering high-quality content for their customers. The way SEO works have changed, too, focusing on more targeted keywords.

What Factors Go into Successful Web Design?

Instead of focusing primarily on keywords, these days web design centers around user experience. Every business’s customers are different, and understanding what their needs are and what they’re looking for is essential for building a website that performs well. This requires some research into client data.

Another thing that modern web designers excel at is creating a great experience for mobile. Older websites look terrible on smartphones because the scaling is off. Navigating between pages is a pain, and many mobile users simply go somewhere else instead. By investing in high-quality website design, you can have a site that looks beautiful on any platform. The easier it is for visitors to find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to become customers.