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Why It Is Important To Choose An Experienced Website Designer

Just as you won’t want a greenhorn neurosurgeon to operate on your brain or a fresh faced pilot to fly the plane during a time of turbulent weather, you won’t want inexperienced website designers to be in charge of your website development project. Experience teaches professionals about the right ways to do things. With experience, professionals — be it neurosurgeons or pilots or website designers — learn about what works and what doesn’t. Experience, above all, teaches professionals about where the trapdoors lie hidden. With experience, professionals learn about the pitfalls to avoid which will in turn save you both time and money.

Experience & Website Designers

The World Wide Web has grown tremendously in the last 20 years since the first rudimentary hyperlinked web pages were built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. The Internet itself is closer to 40 years old from its birth as a Department of Defense (DoD) project, the ARPAnet. Cellphones and smartphones have become incredibly commonplace — not only in advanced nations but also in the developing world. Mobile usage has exploded in the past decade as the cost of ownership has gone below $100 but the first rudimentary cellphones go back nearly 40 years to the bulky handsets developed by Motorola. Over these decades, technology has advanced — in website design as much as in cellphones.

Disruptive Force of The Internet

It’s worth noting what a disruptive force the Internet has been in a variety of industries. Take newspapers and encyclopedias for example, which used to be our go-to sources of current and archival information. Information used to be disseminated by authorities and they used to come to us in expensive, leather-bound volumes. Now, everything is online. All the newspapers as well as all the information are available virtually for free. So, access to information has been democratized — it’s far easier to read the New York Times online no matter where you are located in the world rather than having to gain access to a physical copy of the paper. Wikipedia of course has meant the end of Microsoft Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica (or at least its print edition). Since everything is online, website design is more critical than ever before.

The Internet has killed DVDs and audio CDs as the means to watch your favorite movie, TV show, or listen to your favorite musician. Streaming has replaced the old DVDs and CDs. We now have Netflix, HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Apple iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, etc. One remarkable thing about the growth of the Internet is the growth in the bandwidth of the Internet. Broadband Internet is now commonplace with average speeds of anywhere from 2 MBPS to 100 MBPS depending on which country you live in. This has made video streaming possible and commonplace. The easy availability of broadband video, 4G LTE networks, smartphones have all meant that people have become used to consuming information in the form of video. People spend billions of hours every month watching YouTube videos.

If you are a content owner, provider or distributor or even an advertiser, it now makes sense to package your content in a video. People are more inclined to watch a 2-minute or 5-minute video than read 2,000 or 5,000 words. No wonder viral videos attract millions and tens of millions of views. The point is that website design is something that needs to be taken seriously as the online world has exploded beyond what anyone has ever imagined.

A World of Blogs, Tumblrs, and Pinterest Boards

Everyone is a publisher now and everyone has a voice. Everyone is also present on a variety of Social Media platforms. You can have a Blogger blog or a WordPress blog and publish your writings, musings, poetry or anything at all that you love. The number of cookery blogs and mommy blogs are legion. For lovers of fine photography, there are Pinterest boards and Instagram photos have become de rigour. People take to Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr depending on their inclinations or interests.

21st Century Website Design

Website design now has grown far more complex than before. It is no longer enough to get a bare bones website up and running. “If you build it, they’ll come” may be true in some other field but is certainly not true as far as websites are concerned. Your websites not only have to be up and running, they must also be eye-catching and easy to discover from search engines. When there are literally one billion websites in the world, you have got thousands and tens of thousands of competing websites in every niche. So, whether your website is merely about your hobby of photography, or a nascent ecommerce website targeted to adventure sports enthusiasts, you will need to make sure that your website has all the bells and whistles so that you are able to effectively compete with the other websites in your domain.

Experienced Website Designer Advantage

Here is what you will get by opting for experienced website designers.

Best Technology

Websites can be developed using WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Ruby on Rails and so on. Experienced website designers will know what technology suits what needs. You need to choose the right CMS platform for your website if you are in the publishing niche. You need the right Ecommerce platform if you are planning an Ecommerce website. An Ecommerce website will need to have payment gateways, product categorization, blog, shopping cart, promotional or marketing emails, etc.

Latest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Just as website technologies have changed and become more complex, so has SEO. It has not become irrelevant as some might like to think, but it has become more subtle and sophisticated. Old-fashioned link spamming and other black hat techniques are certainly out.

Google has made immense changes to its search algorithm so as to put only relevant and non-spammy websites and results at the top of its search results. Google has grown ever more sophisticated as it tries to keep a step ahead of those who try to game the Google search results to derive benefits that they don’t deserve. Google’s Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates have ensured that link spamming gets severely punished while new and original content is highly valued.

Hence the importance of blogs on websites as well as the value placed on original content. This is the new SEO.

Website design is also critical when it comes to SEO as the better user experience a person has, the more they will come back to your website. Making your websites mobile-optimized is part of SEO too as Google gives preference to websites that are light and easy to load and read on mobiles and smartphones. This is again another example of Google trying to serve the most relevant links in the Google organic search results to its search users.

So, make sure that your websites are responsive — which means adopting responsive website design technology that leads to a website which displays perfectly on all screen sizes and is equally user-friendly on a smartphone, a tablet, and a desktop or laptop. Above, are just some of the things that need to kept in mind when working with a web design professional.

Being Ready for The Social Web

Since Social Media has become such an important part of the lives of online customers, they also send signals to search engines like Google. If you want your news or content website to be right up there with the NYTs and the WSJs, you need to put up good content that people will love to read, browse and view.

Also, such content has to be shareable to different Social Media. So, integrating those Social Media buttons is important when a website design professional is putting together your website. If a news story or article or opinion piece gets tweeted by thousands of people and is shared on Facebook by thousands, that will get thousands of clicks raising its value in the eyes of search engines. Search engines will display the link in the search results for relevant keywords. So, a key part of SEO is tagging an article or other content with the right keywords, the right news_keywords, and even the right microdata markup such as Open Graph or Schema.org markup.

Use Experienced Website Designers — And Stay Ahead of The Competition

Schema.org markup is an example of what separates the good from the merely average — if not bad. It’s something Google recommends websites embed; but few websites do. The best websites have microdata markup. Experienced website designers will make sure that your website gets these little things — or, rather, these important things — rights. Smart businesses do things smartly. Companies such as Apple are the masters in what they do. They design the best smartphones and incorporate the latest technology and raise the bar in terms of touch screen technology and screen resolution and much else that is available on consumer devices.

But they also play hardball with competitors by patenting every innovation of theirs. Mr. Steve Jobs was a master at this. He was great at protecting every intellectual property of Apple by patenting. He himself is named in hundreds of patents and such patents with Mr. Jobs as one of the individuals named as being responsible for them continue to flow the patent filing and granting mechanism even today — more than three years after his death. Mr. Jobs was not above issuing veiled threats to competitors. As revealed in ongoing court cases about Apple’s possible abuse of anti-competitive statutes, he wrote to a competitor in an email: ‘please take a look at our patent portfolio and you might like to consider your stance before taking a final decision.’ Lastly, Apple is a master when it comes to website design and it can be seen clearly.

Conclusion

Website design is a long-term investment and it is a strategic investment. If you want to become a leading player in your niche, your website has to be comparable to the best. It must meet all the technology and aesthetic requirements. Technologies will only get more and more complex in the future and websites will need to do more. By opting for experienced website designers at offshore development companies like Mind Digital, you make a solid investment that will pay you rich dividends in the long run.