Does your design fit your industry image?

Your website design needs to do more than fit your business. It also needs to fit in with your industry. If your web design doesn’t reflect some of the aspects of other sites in your industry, you risk losing traffic and losing profits.How can web design achieve this? Easily. Each industry has developed its own conventions, its own ‘look’ when it comes to website design. All you need to do is use the wrong conventions, and you can accidentally place yourself within a different industry.

For example, a site that makes use of plenty of white space, an austere, serif font, and keeps its colours to navy, dark red or other heritage colours will mark itself out as a corporate-level site. Add a picture of young people, and you’re probably looking at a university site. Put in an image of a stack of reports, and you could be looking at a stockbroker or other professional business service. What you wouldn’t expect from such a site, though, is retail, a blog, or any other number of sites that don’t offer high-level professional services.

What’s the consequence of a misplaced web design? You can talk to our experts about this at SEO Consult. The main thing to worry about is deterring internet users. Design conventions take the place of other signs that we miss out on in the digital world, so an internet user seeing the wrong design type could think they’ve got the wrong site. In other words, a misplaced design could boost your bounce rate, something you want to avoid.This doesn’t mean that you have to make your web development company copy a competitor’s site. Some experimentation is of course permissible. Stray too far from the norm, however, and you risk placing yourself outside of your market.