Websites have become a standard means for any company to connect with their customers online and drive business success. In the same manner, web developers have become integral professionals in today’s website-driven marketplace.
The rising demand for competent web developers brought forth steeper competition worldwide. As more businesses expand, more IT-related fields also expand, such as web development services. Singapore is a fine example among the leaders in digital innovation in its home region of Southeast Asia.
However, keeping pace with technological and social trends that seem to change every day made web design a very challenging field. As the number of websites increases, so do the ways website owners take in designing their interface and content, resulting in clutter and other problems that could ultimately affect businesses in negative ways.
This leads to a crucial question: how does one know if a website’s design is overdone and how can it be fixed?
Web Development as Craft
One of the basic things to remember about web development is that it is fundamentally an art form. Despite its technical nature, web development involves the ability to master not just programming languages but also using creativity and knowledge of aesthetics.
Of course, there’s the computer science side to it. A constant challenge in web development is the need to stay updated with the constantly emerging technology. The functional aspects of a website require constantly retooling in a variety of new programming languages and web technologies such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
Web design and development processes must integrate a growing number of considerations. It has become a matter of balancing aesthetics with functionality, customer relations with company image, and profitability with usability.
The Web Development Industry and the Demand for Expertise
The web development industry is a continually-growing industry. According to an IBIS report, in the US alone, web design services have grown by an average of 4.4% annually in the last 5 years. This attests to an ever-increasing demand for web design as an important IT service need of many modern businesses.
There is a growing realisation of the importance of good web design to establish a strong online presence and appeal, and there’s an equally strong recognition that bad design, often a result of poor technical competence, negatively impacts businesses. Bad website designs result in factors like slow loading speed, unattractive aesthetics, poorly-written copy, disorganised content, and difficult navigation functions that lead to poor website performance. This, in turn, results in customer frustration, and dissatisfaction as well as isolation from target markets. Consequentially, it produces poor SEO ranking and market standing, loss of credibility and customer trust, and ultimately leads to loss of sales, revenue, and prospects.
While many of these elements of a bad web design seem simple enough to fix, a good web design today often requires not just a degree of technical competence but substantial experience in the practice.
A Critically Important Task
Given the need to be technically competent and creative, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with the numerous challenges of designing websites today.
As websites use information to communicate, it can also easily overload users. Too much information, whether as text or visuals, lead to websites and even mobile apps becoming overcrowded and confusing. The clutter does not help achieve the goal of giving users purposeful information.
In relation, many websites today appear like islands in a sea of advertisements. This ’tidal wave of pop-ups” sometimes overwhelms websites in ways that are not only aesthetically unpleasant but can also be frustrating to many users. The same can be said of websites that crowd too many visuals that result in unbalanced white spaces.
Furthermore, designs normally target specific audiences. Clumps of copy and visual overload may seem to hit all possible demographics. However, these only reflect that the business may have unclear goals in choosing target clients.
Lastly, lack of analytics to measure performance, weak SEO, difficult navigation, and slow load time are indicators of poor creativity as much as inadequate digital marketing knowledge with their use of inappropriate tools to test and improve websites.
Conclusion
As web design practices become more commonplace, website developers now confront problems regarding aesthetic overload, unclear goals, excessive creativity, and usage of inappropriate tools.
It is, therefore, critical to find web development service providers with a credible record of overcoming these common errors. One such agency is User Experience Researchers Singapore (USER), specialising in website development in Singapore. To know more about our products and services, visit https://www.user.com.sg/.
