I originally wrote this article about blog design. I reworded it and made it about website design. Technically a blog is a website but to make it more relevant to New Design Graphic visitors I decided to reword the article.

5 Important reasons why you should care about your website design.

1. First Impressions: First impressions are key. Rarely do we get the chance to make a second impression, especially on the internet. If your website looks disorganized, cluttered, over monetized, extremely plain, or even too much like other website it could give people an undesirable impression. Within the first five seconds a visitor is on your website an impression is made. Sometimes a really bad design is all the reason they need to leave and never come back.

2. Pleasant Experience: You can offer your readers a good experience or frustrate them with hard to find content. We should make it our goal as web publishers to provide our readers with a good experience. We should not only offer them great content but also a pleasant experience.

3. Returning Visitors and Feed Readers: If you goal is to just acquire feed readers then the importance of good website design may seem unimportant. But it is important. First of all you should want people to visit your website. The traffic received from visitors can increase your income (if that is desired), reader awareness of links you include on your site and increase visitor interaction.

4. Website Branding: Whether you realize it or not we are all visual people. Some of us visualize a lot and others not as much but we all can visualize things in our minds. Think about this. What do people see when they visualize your website?
Good website design is far easier to remember than bad or plain designs. Your website can be remembered for having the worst design ever but if that is your goal then you are surely taking away from your content. Help your visitors remember your website by offering them a design that is worth remembering.

5. Set the Standard: Have you ever visited a neighborhood where all the houses on the block had nice landscaping except for one? The standard set for that neighborhood is to have nice landscaping. Since nice landscaping is a desirable feature the one house that does not have nice landscaping is not meeting the standard and is an eye sore.
Website design is continuing to improve within the world wide web. The standard is already being set. Don’t let your website be an eye sore. Improve your website design.

Or hire me to redesign your website for you. Contact me.

My hope is that these five reasons will help you to understand how blog design can effect how your visitors view your blog. Though the design of your blog is not more important than the content, it is very important and should not be taken lightly.

Mona Weathers~New Design Graphics

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 4:35 pm and is filed under Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.