Whether you are running a small landscaping business or a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, the process of designing your website will play a key role in your success. Many business owners have grown to understand the importance of web design over the years. However, some struggle to keep up with this constantly-evolving industry.

While some industries have experienced little change over the past few decades, web design looks almost nothing like it did when it began to grow in the early 1990s. New techniques and methods are changing the web design process on a daily basis, and the old ways of design must be continually phased-out.

Overthrowing the Old

So what is so bad about the old ways of website design? Compare them to the days before the invention of the printing press. Before this powerful invention, monks recorded all documents by hand. While this was a highly-skilled method that produced some of the most beautiful artefacts we have today, it also took an astonishingly long time. When the printing press finally arrived, the creation of documents was suddenly much cheaper and available to everyone. This invention gave people the vital ability to communicate messages almost instantaneously, and eventually led to the Reformation.

During the early days of web design, the only way to create websites involved hand-crafting designs in graphics software packages and converting them into basic HTML. While it is still possible to create webpages this way, it is extremely expensive, inefficient and requires a lot of specialised skill. The old ways of web design simply do not provide the flexibility and efficiency demanded by today’s marketplace.

How Direct Marketing Changed Everything

Direct marketing generally refers to a marketer’s ability to communicate and sell directly to his/her customers. This ability to sell directly to large groups of consumers from a distance led to the development of many new marketing methods and tests to determine what techniques actually work. In the past, it took weeks to test and refine marketing messages, but the speed and efficiency of modern web design now allows marketers to perform testing in a fraction of that time.

Welcoming the New

Many web designers continue to struggle with the old ways of thinking, believing that web pages must be carefully-crafted, packed with graphics and designed over a long period of time. However, recent studies have shown that graphic design is only a small part of the successful equation. The most important goal of the design is to communicate the intended message.

The new web design process should focus much more on market research, identifying the potential traffic, analysing the competition and providing what the market actually wants. Due to the technology professional designers now have at their fingertips, all of this can be completed in a much smaller amount of time than any web design process before.

For a website to convert sales, collect leads and spread the message effectively, your web designer must welcome the new way. The professional marketers and designers who master these new technologies and skills will have a major advantage over the rest.