Let’s talk about Web Design.

Have you ever found a business or product or anything that you were really excited about? So excited that you immediately went to find the website? You wanted to: get more information, purchase something, sign up for something… You wanted to do what you’d expect to do on a website?

But then, when you get to that website, you find out very quickly that it’s not optimized for mobile. And to make matters worse, you don’t have access to a computer. Or it looks like an application from Windows 98. It has excessive typos. And you cannot find any of the information you’re looking for. Or, perhaps even worse, they don’t HAVE a website. Their website link on Google takes you to Facebook. If you’ve found that frustrating, you’re definitely not alone.

I went through this experience recently.

Poor web design became a hurdle in my search for childcare

I’ve been trying to find a daycare for our child, and I have run into ALL of those issues.

• web design is not mobile friendly
• website is extremely outdated or really poorly designed and not readable
• website has spelling and grammatical errors galore
• website has no info on rates or who to contact for information or what types of schedules are offered
• there are no pictures of the daycare center
• the business has no website at all, just Facebook

I’m not going to get into the cost or availability of daycare in this post. I might save that for a slice of life rant if I really need to get it out. I want to focus on the impact that a poorly-designed website has on audience perception and trust.

I’ll focus on one point first. When a “website” link on a Google business profile just took me to a Facebook page. Although, come to think of it, there was one that didn’t even have a Facebook page…. Anyway.

Facebook pages are great supplemental tools, but they’re not a better option than your own website. Social Media is a great place to share news and photos, though! Facebook pages are owned and operated by someone else and beholden to someone else’s policies. And if you do something to get your account flagged, that page can be disabled in an instant. If it is, you’ll have to go through major hoops to get it back.

Facebook business pages can also get hacked.

Someone I know who has a business page on Facebook and no website of their own had their account hacked while they were on vacation and they are now completely blocked from their business page. That page has been turned into some scammy page with broken English that posts really bad, religious AI art multiple times a day, and this poor woman is having an extremely hard time getting it back.

It can also be difficult to find specific information on Facebook. You may have made a post with some really valuable and important information, but unless you’ve also added that info to your About section or somewhere else that’s easily accessible, it’ll get lost fairly quickly, depending on how often you post.

Then we have the websites that are clearly DIY’ed and poorly designed so that navigation is a nightmare and some of the buttons or links don’t even work, or they lead to the wrong destination. These sites are also usually riddled with spelling and grammar issues.

When navigation is not clear, it leads to a poor user experience (UX) and the people visiting your site will have a hard time finding the info they’re looking for. With high speed internet basically being a necessity now, we as humans have developed a lack of patience when it comes to finding information online. A secret to good web design? The fewer clicks to get to something, the better.

To drive that point home, the average amount of time a user spends on a web page is 10-20 SECONDS.

If they can’t find a reason to stay on your website within 10 seconds per page, they’re going to look elsewhere for whatever they were looking for.

In my case, I really needed to find daycare, so I was searching every single one of these websites up and down, going through each page at least twice. Didn’t have the info I needed. They were not mobile friendly and when I’m not working, I’m with my child and not at my computer, so I am only able to look for these places on my phone. They also did not have pictures of the daycare itself, except for maybe one or two pictures of what looked like a basement with laundry machines and some toys.

Now, this might be a design-snob thing (maybe like 10% design snob), but I would not personally trust my child (or money) to a place that doesn’t care enough about how they come off to their target market to have a well-built and user friendly website. I definitely wouldn’t trust my child to a daycare that has ZERO online presence. It’s 2024.

Good web design builds trust

I read reviews prior to looking at any websites, but if I hadn’t seen those reviews, I wouldn’t have even considered reaching out. Especially when the only pictures were either YEARS old, or of a basement with laundry and a few toys.

On the flip side of that, the ones that had well-designed, functional, user-friendly websites? I reached out to all of them. We’re on the waitlist for all of them. Even though we likely can’t afford any of them at the moment and the scheduling we’re looking for isn’t likely to be available.

But the experience with these businesses was smooth and easy and pleasant, and it all started with their websites and user friendly web design.

If you’re feeling a bit targeted by this post, I apologize – that was not at all my intent. My aim here was to highlight the importance of a solid online presence that is NOT purely reliant on social media and that creates a pleasant experience for your target market.

If you look at your own website and have any doubts, I’m more than happy to do a free website audit for you and provide feedback on how it could be improved. Or if you know it needs help, click here to inquire about working together.