Web design is the process of optimizing your website for a better user experience through planning and conceptualizing online content. Whereas web development deals with the technical backend processes that make your site functional – building pages, coding features, fixing bugs – web design deals with how your website looks – creating web graphics, developing the user interface, improving the user experience, and optimizing the design for search engines, for instance.
Web designers will ensure that your website visitors can easily navigate your site and find all the pages they need without much stress or confusion. They’ll ensure that all your text, images, and graphics are clear and readable, and they’ll optimize your site for mobile viewing to streamline the user experience completely.
Although many web builders enable you to develop your own web design even if you have no prior coding knowledge, they usually leave much to be desired. You can only play around with pre-existing themes and templates. If you want a fully customized design, you’ll either need to develop it yourself or hire a web design company to do it for you.
Web design companies create the overall design and layout of your web pages. They can create a full design from scratch or even update existing sites to make them feel more modern and intuitive. They will perfect every aspect of your website that the users can see and interact with – from the background color and design to the appearance of the drop-down menu, location of your Call-to-Action (CTA) buttons, text font, logo presentation, imagery, and more.
They take your web design ideas and turn them into reality.
Web design companies will also perform cross-device and cross-browser testing to ensure that your visitors can seamlessly navigate your site regardless of how they reach it.
It goes without saying that they’ll also do performance testing to ensure that the design choices don’t negatively impact your page loading speed and response time.
Additionally, many web design companies will offer continual support and maintenance to keep your website looking and working flawlessly.
Considering that many popular web builders have some design capabilities, it begs the question of whether web design companies are even necessary. In a nutshell, unless you’re a web designer yourself, you’ll likely need the assistance of a web design company.
Primarily, despite how many themes and templates your chosen web builder may have, you can never truly customize your website without the help of a professional. If you want to present a professional, unified appearance, you’ll need a website that matches your brand’s color scheme, typography, and imagery to a T. No pre-made website theme will be able to cut it.
Only a web designer can ensure that your website is unique, recognizable, and memorable.
Secondly, you’ll save time and effort on designing your website. Depending on your needs, it could take you weeks to perfect your site using a web builder. The whole process will be done much faster with a web design company.
Finally, the whole point of web design is to improve the user experience, and only a professional designer can achieve this. User expectations are continuously changing, and the web designer’s job is to stay on top of them. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you’ll hire a web design company and impress your clients.
When selecting your web design company, you’ll need to look for businesses that: