How Your Website Design Can Destroy Your Brand
Good design vs bad design matters when it comes to your website.
Can your website design hurt your brand? Yes. Bad design can have a devastating effect on your marketing and branding. Your website is a direct representation of your company. The design can help or hurt your brand, product or services, and even the personality of your company.
Your website is often the first impression you make to online visitors. It plays a crucial role in the performance and success of your business. That said, you need to ensure that your brand can be found online and drive traffic to your site. While doing this still create trust through branding.
We are constantly making small tweaks to our site and testing it. We like to see if one metric plays out and increases interaction over another layout or if it’s the reverse. These numbers play an important role when we redesign certain sections of our site. It is important for you to work on your site as well to always increase conversions.
Good Website Design Creates Trust. Bad Design Does Not.
Just as you have your own personality, your company has a personality as well. It’s important to make sure your website reflects that.
Having a strong and consistent personality can help create trust and loyalty. It encourages community growth around the brand. It can also give users a reason to buy from you so they can support their favorite brands. It can help your company by building a trustworthy website people like to follow and hear from.
Likewise, if your brand is inconsistent it may feel untrustworthy. It can create the opposite effect and people won’t return to the site. Users won’t trust your company and will have a low likelihood of purchasing products.
Developing Consistency Between Your On and Offline Company Image
Visitors who are prospective clients depend on the look and function of your website. Though many users will happen upon your website, they may arrive from your marketing. Your marketing strategies have a big impact on your brand.
It’s important that when users move from one media source to another, everything matches. Or better said, is branded consistently. If your colors, fonts, mood, or any other aspect doesn’t match, they may feel that they are in the wrong spot. This will impact their trustworthiness in your brand may suffer.
When your website has brand consistency it starts to build trust and loyalty. Your marketing materials such as packaging, emails, fliers, etc. further increase trust. When they land on the website and it meets expectations, their confidence in the brand grows. This, in turn, increases the likelihood of them buying your product.
Colors
Your website colors should immediately reflect your brand. To give examples, if I name a soft drink whose logo is red, most people will respond with Coca-Cola. If I mention a coffee brand utilizing a green logo, people say Starbucks. Fast food with a golden arch logo, McDonald’s, and so on. Your brand has the potential to create this same impact with a little bit of marketing creativity and a whole lot of brand consistency.
So with that said, make sure your colors are consistent, not only on your physical marketing materials but on your website as well. This will be the first indicator of trust to your users and it’s not something that should be overlooked. Colors matter.
Fonts
Your website fonts can get tricky. Even with the vast library that Google Fonts now has available, it can still be tricky to find the font that your designer used on your marketing material. Since loading a custom font can have a significant impact on your SEO, it’s often best to pick a web font that compliments your brand. If you have trouble selecting one, visit your graphic designer and have them help you choose a font that will represent your brand efficiently.
Mood
The mood of your website is often confusing at first. After all, how can a website have a mood? To clarify this, the mood is the overall feel of the website when you visit. Is it designed for happiness, playfulness, despair, horror, elegance, etc? Each website can have a different mood and there will be extremes when it comes to this. Compare a website designed for young children vs. a website designed for the local haunted house on Halloween. Those would be two drastically different websites with very different moods to each of them.
Images
Everyone knows that images are an essential part of web design but we see images used incorrectly all the time on websites. From images that simply don’t match the brand or mood, to generic spammy looking images, to background images. Bad image usage is all over.
A method we use all the time is text overlay on an image. In fact, it’s a pretty common method of web design and you’ve probably seen it all over the web as well. However, when this method becomes bad design is when the background image isn’t tinted or shaded in such a manner that you can actually read the text. I’ve seen plenty of websites with text placed over the top of a fully saturated video or image and it’s next to impossible to read.
Images on a website are great, but it’s important to maintain a good text-to-image relationship. Supply the users with the visual stimulation they need to maintain interest, but not so much that it becomes difficult to find the information you are looking for. Images are a huge factor when it comes to good and bad design. Make sure your images match the company branding and aid in the end goal vs. just being something you happen to enjoy. Not all users share your taste in photography.
Enhancing User Experience Through Page Functionality
A well-designed website will balance beauty and functionality. UI/UX is a term that you may hear from time to time which stands for User Interface, User Experience. In a nutshell, having an easy to navigate site is the user interface which helps guide them through your site and the ease and enjoyment of it is the user experience.
You should really work on testing different forms of navigation, call-to-action locations, content distribution, and interlinking. All these factors play a role in how long the users stay on your website, consume more content, and ultimately, a purchase. How well laid out your page is can quickly allow a user to determine if the page is useful to them or not. Even a few pages with low or useless content can hurt the entire site.
User Interface
There is a line between creative user interfaces and functional user interfaces. A designer’s job is to narrow that line so you can have a creative interface that is immediately functional to the user. After all, the user is on your website for various reasons, but one reason is not to try to figure out how to navigate your website. Your navigation should be immediately clear and moving in and out of your website pages should be clear and conscise. If a user has to figure out where the navigation bar is on each page, they will quickly become frustrated and leave your website. Clear navigation will let them move between the pages with ease and fulfill their intent as quicly as possible.
A user’s attention span is fairly short and our job as website owners is to supply them the information or products they request as quickly as possible. Often you will see websites with multiple navigation menus. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it’s important to make sure that when you switch to a mobile device that you don’t get multiple hamburger menus that aren’t labeled. Often, when I have multiple menus, my secondary menu will be much shorter and will not toggle to a button when sized to mobile.
That way, the menu is very clear that there is only one real selection to make where the multiple choices are, this way your users aren’t confused as to which navigation to choose from and the choice is clear.
Also, be careful with menus that are way too long. I’ve come across many websites that the menu is so long that the flyout or dropdown menus are so long that they actually go off screen. This is not only bad for the user, but it can also causes distrust due to poor quality, and often the code will not work correctly causing even more problems, further reducing the trust of the users. If a menu is going to be incredibly long, try breaking it up into categories to aid in navigation.
User Experience
The User Interface and User Experience go hand-in-hand. When the interface is easy to navigate, the experience on the website is heightened. The quicker the user can find what they need, how they interact with it, the better experience they will have.
However, it’s best not to hide crucial elements such as the navigation as that can negatively affect the user’s experience on the website.
Scroll Hijacking
Design goes beyond just the visuals when it comes to websites. With the advancements of coding, you can go as far as modifying how the mouse cursor interacts with the website as well.
There are a few times where it makes sense to hijack the user’s scrolling feature but this is usually pretty rare. When a user is used to how their mouse scrolls the page, then suddenly it changes, has elastic scrolling, or smooth scrolling features, though it might look cool, it’s usually not very welcomed by the user. If this feature makes them frustrated, you may lose potential customers.
When it comes to scrolling, it’s usually best to allow the user to keep what they are used to unless there is a very specific feature for this.
Website Speed
The speed of your website can have a direct effect on how well your business is doing online. It’s important to have a website load as fast as possible. Under 3 seconds is best, but each second increases your bounce rates. Google has also said that website speed is a direct and large ranking factor.
Start a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
There are plenty of CDN’s available and many of them even have a free service available. My personal favorite is Cloudflare. This is one of the more advanced technical factors of speeding up a website, but even if you have basic knowledge, it’s pretty easy. Though do be aware that if issues arise, the solutions aren’t straightforward and your website can drop and you will probably need a developer to fix them.
Caching
A good caching plugin is also very helpful for your website. If you run your website on Siteground, they offer a free caching plugin called SG Cache. However, most of our websites run our favorite caching software called WP Rocket. If you prefer another free caching plugin, we also like WP Supercache and W3 Total Cache. Make sure you only run one caching program at a time.
Images
Properly sized and compressed images are crucial. Photoshop’s Save For Web is great for this. You can also compress images using tinyjpg.com. If you don’t use Photoshop, install a compression plugin. I prefer Imagify, but ShortPixel and WP Smush are also options. Use bulk optimize if you’ve already uploaded images.
Website Host
Hosting is one of the largest factors in website speed. We love Siteground. Another comparable host is BlueHost. If you need a managed host, consider WP Engine.
Why Is All This Important for Design?
When it comes to website design, you want to look at the entire picture. A beautiful site that loads slow, has choppy animations, or broken images will fall apart quickly.
Design a Website with SEO in Mind
SEO is constantly changing. We update our SEO articles regularly because strategies shift quickly.
Search engine optimization is a marketing strategy that companies use to increase ranks and visibility. With the right website design and proper content, your website will increase in relevance to your users. Ranking high can increase traffic and, combined with good UX, improves conversion rates.
SEO Isn’t What It Used To Be
SEO used to rely on keyword stuffing, low-quality links, and other black hat tactics. Today, SEO is user-focused and aligned with technical best practices that also improve readability and user experience.
Negative SEO Attacks
Negative SEO attacks used to be more effective. One method is sending large volumes of low-quality links to a site. Today, it’s often easy to overcome: monitor backlinks (e.g., aHrefs), disavow bad links, and upload to Google Search Console.
The Call-To-Action
A call to action can increase conversions when used correctly, or drive traffic away when used incorrectly. A good website design incorporates techniques that convert visitors into leads and sales.
Be careful with intrusive CTAs. Forced pop-ups are discouraged by Google. Exit intent modals that lock the page may be discouraged and could hurt rankings. Consider A/B testing removal.
Good Design vs Bad Design
Web design is essential for branding and marketing. It’s important to do it right and constantly test for improvements.
Here’s a summary:
A Good Website Design:
- User-friendly and relevant
- Fast-loading
- Attractive and consistent with your brand
- Has a useful call-to-action
- Great SEO
A Bad Website Design:
- Not user-friendly
- Overcrowded with useless content
- Loads slowly
- Unattractive
- Generally has poor functionality
Constantly Modify Your Website
A website shouldn’t be put up and forgotten about. Most websites should evolve to show the company is current while remaining trustworthy.
Document changes, when they were done, and their effects. If a change causes an ongoing drop, revert and reassess.
The Overall Effect of Your Website
Website design goes beyond graphics—it includes infrastructure and hierarchy. A beautiful site on a slow host or broken structure is just as harmful as poor layout.
When designing your website, think through every user encounter. Your users will thank you and Google will reward you with better rankings and more traffic.
Share Your Results
Share your good design vs bad design story. Have you ever made changes that resulted in a traffic drop? Was it design or functionality? Leave a comment with your story!
