Website design can make or break your Liverpool driving school's success. This is why having a good web design is critical for your driving school business.
There is a lot of talk about the importance of a business website. In this day and age, having an online presence is critical. However, we don't hear much about the importance of website design.
Web design is something that many driving instructors overlook, but it could be the key to their success. If your website is underwhelming or isn't bringing in the traffic you require, the design could be the culprit.
Today, we'll discuss the value of website design, providing some insight into the specific value that superior design can bring to your business. Let's get this party started.
The Value of Good Web Design
The first step in developing a driving school business website is to ensure functionality. There is no benefit if a website does not function properly. Furthermore, if certain parts of your website do not function properly, this is a huge deterrent to potential customers.
The majority of the time spent developing a website is spent ensuring that everything works properly on the back end. The website should be designed so that the code runs all the way through, there are no broken links, and the applications on your website can be used.
Videos, interactive sections, and checkout interfaces should all be in good working order. The site should be hosted on a server that can handle all of those things as well.
When using ready-made website generators, you can include a lot of features, but there's no telling how well they'll work. When you create a website in a short period of time, you are not preparing to accommodate the things that your site may require in the future.
User Experience Factors
However, functionality is more than just having things work properly. Functionality is concerned with the flow of your website, how users interact with it, and the overall experience that a visitor has when visiting your website.
Let's begin with a general bad example that most of us have encountered at some point in our lives.
You're looking for information on the internet. You conduct a Google search and scroll down until you find something that appears to answer your question. You get to the site, and the header seems to meet your needs.
A swarm of angry popups and widgets swarms your page. They include pop-up chat boxes, newsletter subscription offers, dancing images that entice you to "click," and more. Worse, they're so crammed onto the page that you can't even click out of them, let alone read any of the text.
These site features could be useful if they were properly placed on the page. However, due to poor site design, they overwhelm the user and force them to leave the website.
All of those exciting features can crowd each other out and lower the quality of your site.
ARCHITECTURE OF A WEBSITE
The general layout of your pages is another aspect of site design. Consider a website to be a house with multiple doors and rooms. Each link on your site leads to one of your website's rooms (pages).
There are more and more rooms to navigate to and from as you expand. A good website should make it simple to navigate to any page. Your website is too complicated if it takes more than two or three clicks to get to a specific page.
A well-designed website allows users to navigate it without having to do too much digging. Nobody will visit your contact page if it is at the end of a long list of links, for example.
The user should be able to figure out how to get to any page with just a few clicks. While small websites are unaffected by this, mid-to-large websites begin to require restructuring to streamline their user experience.
GRAPHIC DESIGN AND AESTHETICS
Not everything is about general functionality. There's also something to be said about the appearance of your website.
People are much more likely to engage with a site that is beautiful, functional, and simple to use. Aesthetics also contribute to user trust, which should be considered.
Consider a website you've visited in the past and didn't trust. Those are usually the sites with the worst graphic design. Maybe one or two of the links didn't work, and you worried that your information wouldn't be safe on the site.
It's difficult to pinpoint what makes a website appear less trustworthy, but it has something to do with how it's presented. A good website design incorporates graphic design and allows you to focus on the aesthetic elements that build trust.
INTERFACES FOR ECOMMERCE AND CHECKOUT
This is especially important if your company facilitates online transactions.
Ensure that your eCommerce functions are always operational. A faulty interface is the most significant deterrent to online customers. Consider this: would you want to enter your credit card information into an interface that didn't always work?
If things are lagging, slow, and unappealing to look at, your odds of hanging onto customers start to decrease. A good website design allows you to curate that section of your website in such a way that any potential issues are mitigated.
Advantages of Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimisation is another important aspect of digital success (SEO). SEO is the process of designing and managing your website in accordance with search engine algorithms. This almost always entails tailoring things to Google's search engine algorithm.
It may appear intimidating at first, but it is not rocket science.
Google employs approximately 200 ranking factors to determine which sites should rank for specific keyword searches. It collects information on those factors using "bots."
Bots are artificial intelligence programmes that crawl the internet through links, gathering relevant information about websites as they go. When the bot visits your site, you want to ensure that it provides a useful report to the algorithm.
So, how does site design contribute to this?
QUALITY OF THE BASELINE SITE
When it comes to ranking websites, Google prioritises a few factors. It looks at site speed, site architecture, functionality, and a variety of other factors. That being said, establishing yourself with a well-designed website sets you apart from almost all of your competition.
Many small and local driving schools do not invest in their online presence.
Investing in website design improves the quality of numerous important search engine ranking factors. Another factor that Google considers is how users interact with your website.
METRICS OF USERS
Some of the user metrics that Google looks for are the average user's time on your site and whether or not that user leaves without engaging.
There is a trail of information created from the time someone lands on your page until they leave. There are metrics that track how your users interact with your site, and this data is used to determine where you rank in Google.
Sites with higher user engagement are thought to be more valuable to other users.
Poorly designed websites have a way of turning off users and producing poor metrics. When you invest in good site design, you will see an increase in user engagement metrics.
Methods for Improving Website Design
In an ideal world, we could all design and manage our own websites. That being said, unless you have some training, that is a very difficult thing to do.
If you're a small business owner with limited time, you might not be able to devote your efforts to learning about coding, web analytics, and everything else that goes into website management. The wonderful thing is that there are skilled professionals available to assist you.
Professional website design is the most effective way to create a website that will help your business grow. A professional can look over your site, analyse where you might be going wrong, and make the necessary changes.
You'll also be able to collaborate with talented graphic designers, SEO wizards, and any other magical professionals who can help your site take off.
Do You Want to Improve the Design of Your Company's Website?
Hopefully, today's discussion of website design was useful to you. You may be concerned that your website isn't up to standard.
That's fine, because we're here to help. If you're trying to grow your business but can't seem to make an impression online, your website could be the problem. Often, a minor adjustment is all that is required.
Contact us to learn more about your website design options, SEO insights, branding advice, and more.