7 Benefits of Having a Professional Website Design | Web Design Principles

CEO's don't dress like they're homeless and wine tasting events are generally never held in the back of a liquor store. There's a good reason behind this. People generally do not follow the "don't judge a book by it's cover" motto, so the very first thing they do is, you guessed it, judge your book by it's cover. The same is true for website designs -people visit your site and immediately make a decision on if it's a place they're going to spend time (and money) at, or if they're going to lump you in with the millions of other sites that look just like yours and move on to something else.

As you can see, the benefits of having a professional design can be great, especially if your website is geared towards building your business. Outlined in this post are 7 different reasons why it's beneficial to have a professional web design.

1. Added exposure through CSS galleries

One of the benefits of having a professional design created is that you're able to submit the website to galleries around the web and have it showcased to audiences that you would have otherwise never been in front of. This brings in added traffic, potential clients and also adds to your authority by being talked about across the web and showcased as a professional website.

2. Your first impressions do count

Like I discussed in the beginning of this article, your first impression made is an important one - and a professional website design is definitely going to leave a better first impression that one that looks as if it was put together by your cousins neighbor who is 12 and just got his first PC.

3. Highlight your expertise with ease

With a professional website design, you're able to showcase the things you do best - if you're a designer, the design itself showcases your skills and if you're a writer, you're able to utilize a great design to highlight areas you excel at - maybe setting up a call to action box integrated into the design that lets people know what you do and how they can hire you. This would be much better than just having a site slopped together with no real direction.

4. Better design + more eyes = More sales

With your killer design, you're attracting visitors from all over the web - they want to sit & stare at the beautiful website design you've got on display and then, out of nowhere, they're going to get the urge to pull their credit card out of their pockets and buy tons of products from you. Well, it might not happen exactly like that, but a good design that brings in more visitors is definitely going to have some of that trickle into your sales.

5. Less bugs and cross browser compatibility

If you hire someone who is great with IE6 but has yet to hear about the fact that IE7 and IE8 are out, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome are all web browsers and they're severely behind the times, how do you expect them to make sure that your website is accessible to the visitors of your site? A professional web designer will ensure that your website is clearly viewable on all major browsers, thus giving you the ability to keep your professional appearance up in front of everyone viewing your site, even those who are viewing in the less-than-popular browsers (IE6).

6. Reduce your maintenance time greatly

With a professional website design, the time you actually have to spend cleaning things up and making sure everything is up to day drops drastically, giving you more time to focus on the things that matter most - traffic, sales and increased visibility. The majority of the time, your design will not even have to be touched for a year or two - until you're ready for an updated look, at which time you can contact your original designer to give you a face lift, keeping your hands free to, again, make more sales and run your business.

7. Increased search engine visibility

Some people may not believe it, but the benefits of a professional web design also trickle into your search engine rankings and visibility. For starters, a professional web designer will ensure the code markup is clean and easy to read - great for spiders who crawl your page. The other increase of search visibility comes from all of those links and the added exposure your website design gets across the web - design blogs regularly feature the awesome designs they find across the web and the new clients you bring in will feature a link back to your site at the bottom of their site, increasing your back links (this is something you'd have to make sure your clients are OK with - I know from my business that 9 times out of 10 they're fine with it).

via webdesign.org