Web design visualizes the creative path for a user to get acknowledged with a business' products or services. Once a user has entered the website, passing information about the business to the visitor is easy. But, a great website design makes sure of the right vibe created for the brand image of any organization. Various key aspects in web designing like typography, minimalist concept, responsiveness to different devices and browser compatibility play the higher nodes in the minds of designing experts. Moreover, trends like CSS Animation to bring personality to the sites and Parallax Scrolling effect with the 3D layout just refuse to go away from the web!
Web designing demands a wide range of creative and technical skills in the generation and upkeep of sites. The diverse territories of website architecture incorporate graphical communication; interface configuration; smart coding; user experience design; and search engine optimization. Basically, any gorgeous website of a business that is performing well in terms of website traffic as well as creating successful conversions is the result of the perfect execution of the aforementioned parameters.
SURVEY OF GLOBAL WEB DESIGN COMPANIES
This survey was conducted among 200+ web design agencies adjoining with freelance web designers to know the client-centric information in reference to hiring web designing experts. Also, the latest designing trends and tools have proven to be effective and efficient respectively from the perspective of top web design companies. The research participants belonging to flexible socioeconomics has unquestionably fueled up the nature of this research. These attentive members who have responded belong to versatile nations like USA, Ukraine, and India.
Here are the names of the best web design solutions giving organizations at Goodfirms, that were sufficiently indulgent and particular to share their piece of the learning in this comprehensive survey:
The Detailed Findings:
The recent websites have seen bold changes in design like animation, usage of more adventurous colors, innovative typography, constant upgrading of design tools and creative trends of flat design, playful illustrations, asymmetric layouts etc. But again, no matter how beautiful and imaginative these websites are; unless they are responsive across all devices, they are left by the users to gather dust.
Responsive design serves all devices with the same code that adjusts for every screen size. And it has become an absolute necessity to implement not just ‘mobile-friendly’ web designs but ‘mobile-responsive’ ones as per the top web development companies at Goodfirms. There is a line between both these concepts which is still grey for most designers and hence, most of the websites are still lost in the SERPs as a result of mobile-responsive Google algorithm update.
Mobile traffic as a share of total global online traffic in 2017 was more than 50% and has been ahead of the desktop traffic since 2015. These figures are expanding every year, causing sites that are not responsive to lose dynamically bigger bits of their visitors. What’s more? Mobile phones are anticipated to achieve more than 60% of world wide web use before the end of 2019. Basically, businesses need to start concentrating on responsive designs. To get intrinsic details regarding the cost, time, tools, features in trend along with the mistakes made; read the detailed research by Goodfirms below to get all the info with authentic statistics.
1. What is the cost of designing a website with basic features?
The listed web design firms answered with their correct cost extend charged by them for designing, according to their past encounters. Whatever is left of the organizations expressed that it sheerly depends upon the undertaking necessities of the clients. Below is the synopsis of measurements gotten, which states that it will cost an approximation of $3200 to the clients for getting the website designed with core features by experts.
- 35.1% of the participant companies quote their clients between the price range of $1000 to $1500
- 24.3% of them have allocated themselves between the price range of $2000 to $2500
- Another 16.21% of the designing agencies are placed on the straight price of $3000
- 10.81% of the participants chose the price of $4000
- Lastly, 13.51% of the companies have assigned themselves to the price range of $5000 to $6000
2. What factors mainly influence the cost of web design?
The cost of designing a website is connected to the measure of time expected to design your site and the website designers’ hourly rates. And certainly, from the below-obtained statistics in this survey, the time is taken to implement core features & functionalities, the effort-taking creative yet smart UI/UX design and making it all responsive to multiple devices available in the market; majorly influence the cost of web design. The features & functionalities are mostly customized as per the requirements of the clients like the website's technical components, such as e-commerce, message boards, photo galleries, and web forms. More the functionalities, more the cost of designing them.
Secondly, the content management system to be built in the backend for managing versatile content on the site as well as crafting the navigation for the users is the other parameters to influence the cost. Usability & navigation includes sorting out pages into the data design, making the route, and setting the labels for links. The additional time that a designer spends on these assignments, it makes your site less demanding to explore, yet it likewise adds to the cost.
Then, comes the research on the content list by the web designer that includes the list of all the pages and functional features for the website. Finally, comes the two other angles of search engine optimization (SEO) and third-party integrations that make the cost rise a bit more for designing. SEO comprises of tasks like keyword research along with optimizing the web pages with the competitive ones. As the competitiveness of keywords and number of web pages increase, so does the cost.
3. In what time can the designers get your business site ready with necessary features?
Providently, the mentioned web design companies in the above list reverted with their particular scope of time allotments for designing a site, coordinated with fundamental features. The series of devoted time differed from one to three months for every participant also depending upon the type of website to be designed such as eCommerce, web application, business information, content-rich blog and so on. From the obtained data of the survey, the average time period turned out to be 2 months, if you hand over the task of web designing to professionals. The exact figures revealing insight upon the timeframes held by different web design companies are given beneath:
- 80.7% of the firms that involves the maximum share replied with a common period of 1 month.
- Whereas, 23% of the other companies said that it can be done within 1.5 months.
- 27% of the participants admitted on the time period of 2 months.
- Another 11.5% of these agencies gave a timeframe of up to 2.5 months.
- 7.7% of these designing teams held on to a comparatively long time period of 3 months.
4. What UI/UX tools are mainly used by the web design team?
The team of Goodfirms collected information about the best tools available in the market for web designing and disclosed the most common tools among the web designers - Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, InDesign, Adobe XD, Adobe XD CC, Omnigraffle, Dreamweaver, Unity, Maya, and Aftereffect. The next task was to know the most useful tools among the pro designers in the market. The below graph shows clear percentiles acquired by the top four tools from the global designing experts.
Clearly, 88.5% - that is the lion’s share of the designing people have supported the Photoshop tool apart from the favor received by Illustrator (76.9%) and Sketch (75%) with negligible difference. A noticeable percentile of 23.1% was gained by InDesign as well.
Photoshop is a raster graphics editor whereas Illustrator is a vector graphics editor; both developed and published by Adobe Systems for macOS and Windows. InDesign, on the other hand, is a desktop publishing software application produced by Adobe Systems. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, books and ebooks. Sketch is digital design toolkit for creating powerful designs in mac. As an additional insight, the tool called ‘Adobe XD’ or ‘Experience Design’ is slowly gaining popularity in the market and is expected to be in the top used tools by next year.
5. What are the latest trends being chased in web design?
Goodfirms’ research team explored the minds of skilled web designers and dug out the current trends in designing - flat design, expressive typography, broken grid layouts, virtual reality video, and voice user interface & search. And without breaking the convention, the below chart discloses the numeric validation received by each trend from the web designers internationally.
Flat design is a style of interface design stressing the base utilization of stylistic components that give the figment of three dimensions and is centered around a moderate utilization of simple elements, typography, and flat colors. The survey saw 88.5% of the web designers leaning toward flat design since it permits interface plans to be more streamlined and proficient. Additionally, it makes it less demanding to outline an interface that is responsive to changes in browser size across different devices. Not to forget, the designs turn-out sharp and elegant on high definition screens. To get a practical idea of the outcome of a flat design, visit the official website of Porsche and experience it yourself!
Expressive typography has earned the interest of 61.5% of web designers in this survey. It simply means the usage of creative fonts on the world wide web. The font styles hold the power to integrate the vibes of a brand into the words used to describe the brand’s purpose. Year after year, the web designers get more valiant with the fonts and create praiseworthy work solely with unconventional typography; Marsell is one such masterpiece of exclusive typography.
The broken grid layouts did get recognized by 38.5% of the participants in this survey. In visual depiction, a grid is a structure made up of a progression of meeting straight or bent lines used to structure content. The grid fills in as an armature or structure on which a designer can sort out realistic components like pictures, glyphs, sections, and so on in a level-headed, simple to-retain way. This allows the web pages to have impressive box arrangements for all sorts of content that is to be incorporated on it. Visit Atlason for viewing the pragmatic implementation of broken grid layouts.
Virtual reality video with 26.9% as well as voice user interface & search with 23.1% made observable marks in the survey chart. A Virtual Reality Website is a site that uses the WebVR and WebGL APIs to make a 3D domain for a web user to check out the sites utilizing a virtual reality head-mounted show. Diversely, a voice-UI otherwise known as VUI makes human cooperation with PCs conceivable through a voice/speech platform so as to maintain an automated process. In this case, this technology is served with a website allowing users to peruse through the voice-to-text format. Though not high in use for now, but both these trends are anticipated to make a considerable mark on the web by the year 2020.
6. Which is the most common web design mistake made by SMBs?
Crowded web design acts like a plague for your visitors and keeps them away from it. Too much use of content like text, images, ads confuse the users and with no further due, they move onto the next website to solve their purpose. Therefore, 84.6% of web designers have chosen crowded web design to be the most common mistake made by small businesses.
The next common mistake proved to be the case of No CTA buttons on the landing page, with the support of 38.5% of global designers. The Call To Action button is the gateway to a business. It summons the users to accomplish something that would result in progress for both the visitor and the business. It's imperative that the CTA obviously advises about what they have to do and there ought to be sufficient data about what they will get from making a move. Apparently, without CTAs there will be no flow to follow for the users.
The next major concern is hidden navigation of the website. Navigability issues will murder a site's prevalence quickly. Moreover, 30.8% of website specialists said that making the navigation menu elusive is one basic website design glitch that infuriates the visitors. And thus, it is mandatory to make sure the navigational aspects of a website are easily understood and even easier to notice.
Bad web typography and poor use of whitespace were pointed out by 26.9% and 19.2% of the web designers in this survey. Both the factors are directed towards poor content crafting on the website. As stated before, typography is about dealing with fonts and simultaneously, wise use of whitespace in between the content is immensely important. Perfect content needs perfect space where it really belongs to catch the visitors’ eye. It is as simple as that.
7. Which are the top reasons that compel a visitor to leave a website?
Humans have almost no tolerance for machines that don't comprehend and in this manner, there is no space for a blunder. Basically, designers have a very short window of time to get the attention of the visitors on the web. And hence, 88.5% of the survey contributors have selected slow loading time to be the paramount reason for a visitor to leave a website. Secondly, the lack of responsiveness of website design with multiple devices is an issue that was indicated by 73.1% of the survey takers. With mobile-first vogue on peak right now, it is obligatory to design a website numerous times for all screen sizes and a single program of codes.
The third in line for top reasons with a support share of 61.5% of the global designers emerged to be bad navigation consolidated in the website structure. It certainly makes it difficult for the users to peruse through the content of the website. Other than that outdated design and bad content structure with percentile share of 38.5% and 34.6% respectively have also been demonstrated as the reasons for visitors leaving a website. Design and structure are the core angles to keep the user interested in your business products or services, as they form the base of a website design. And if they wear out with reference to the evolving technologies in design, there are high chances for your website to lose prospects as it won’t be able to match the standards of your competitors.
Last comes the obtrusive use of audio/video in the web design which was spotted by a mere 3.8% of the web designers. The audio or video content that disrupts the attention of the visitors from what they want to focus on the website mostly upsets them. It even impels them to leave the website and find a better one to solve their search purpose. Based on the above facts, the global participants of this survey also revealed that the top three features requested by their clients for their website are - responsive design, simple clear navigation, and fast loading speed. The clients even emphasize SEO friendly design that has required social media plugins for their business. Not forgetting the technical security of the complete design structure.
8. When can you be sure that your website needs a redesign?
The Goodfirms team with its in-depth research through the market came up with six major factors that indicate the websites’ need for redesigning. Of which, low conversion rate, high bounce rate, and better UX design appeared to be the top three conditions for the same. Other than these, the absence of a seamless experience due to non-responsiveness of a website across all devices, outdated site and lower ranks in the SERPs were the other weaknesses according to the experienced designers’ reviews. The above chart depicts the exact statistics, displaying the prominence received by each condition highlighted in the survey.
Low conversion rate and high bounce rate are unquestionably correspondents to each other. And designing of a website does play a consequential role in it. A successful web design comprises of clear navigation with accurate CTAs on the landing pages which in-turn directs the audience towards the right path to find exactly what they want. So basically, if the conversion rate is low, web design is one of the items on the checklist that should be analyzed and re-designed if necessary. Interestingly, high bounce rate happens for the same reason. If your visitors do not find what they are looking for in few seconds than their minds have already considered your website of no use and would rather avoid in future to not waste their attention or time! As for the other reasons received in the survey, they are pretty much self-explanatory from the above research.
9. What are the foremost reasons for hiring a professional web designer rather than buying a website builder software?
Website builder software does offer a budget-friendly approach to businesses and ease-of-use while designing the pages but limits the customization of website design. It even makes the process of integrating links, resizing images and search engine optimization painstaking! Also, the finite templates put a limit towards the choices for colors and patterns to be used for the website. Lastly, you miss the ongoing support of the experienced designers, who possess the capability of finishing your design within a short period of time with their expertise.
Have a look at the vital statistics obtained from the survey for the foremost reasons that accentuate on hiring a professional designer rather than a website builder software below:
Conclusion
Integrating user-friendly features & functionalities into the website design and making it responsive to multiple devices does influence the overall cost and time for designing a website. But then, it honors the users with a glorified experience and increases the chances of conversions or other goal completions. Also, making use of standardized tools to create high-end designs through professional web designers is without a doubt an accurate way to shape your digital image on the web gracefully.
This far-reaching research must have given you important insights regarding the top current trends in web design as well as the mistakes to avoid while taking essential decisions for your website’s design. The economical info has surely been gathered from the above research and now comes the question of finding a reliable company that is truly up to date with above-mentioned parameters and has the capability to build a strong character for business through powerful design.
Goodfirms is thus here to assist you with a list of top web design companies that have surpassed Goodfirms’ research criteria and have proven its worth with inspiring portfolios. So, hire the best web design agency from the given list that qualifies your requirements and budget criteria to transform your traditional website to a gorgeous one!
