So you’re building a website and want to not only attract but increase all the right customers to your site? This podcast uncovers two of the best ways to increase traffic to your website: Design and Performance.

Depending on your goals as a business, your website’s needs will vary completely. This is something we’ve learnt working with many of our diverse clients. Each website we develop is custom-designed and encapsulates the brand's essence to appeal to customers. 

Most people think you have to sacrifice one to get the other. In some aspects this is true, but not always. This tug-of-war debate will help to guide your online strategy and make your website easily stand out from the competition. 

James:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. We've got another firecracker of an episode today. What's better? 

Is it having a nice, really awesome, beautiful, pretty website that is the benchmark of design? 

Or is it better to have more of a stripped-down, not as well designed website, but it performs like a bat out of hell? So I'll be taking the website design side of this debate.

Joseph:

I'll be taking the website performance side. So let's get stuck into it.

James:

Awesome. All right, let's get started. So, all right, Joseph, performance. Why do you want to have a high-performing site as opposed to one that looks like it's the Mona Lisa of websites?

Joseph:

It's funny you say that because you can actually have a nice website and it can be good at performance. There are times we've seen nice websites, but are absolutely trash when it comes to performance. 

You need a high-performing website that loads quickly converts customers, and is a true asset to your business. It's super important to have a high-performing website.

Now, performance doesn't come out of the box. You do need to tune your website to be performing. Take our website, for example. I would say our website looks quite spectacular, but it's been tuned and built for performance. 

The results show when you have a high performing website, the ROI and results you get from the website are night and day. Whereas, if you just have a nice-looking website, chances are you're losing a lot of traffic and performance that your business deserves. So James, tell me why design's better than performance.

James:

Well, I'm a videographer and have some fantastic 4k high-resolution films that I want to show. I want to have people when they land on my website, to see my video and the high-resolution, detailed work. I don't want to have them click through to some embedded YouTube play. I want them to see it as soon as they load. 

It might take a bit of a performance hit, but it allows me to immediately engage my audience with the work in which I do. 

Why can't I have that, Joseph? You're a developer. You know that it's a trade-off. 

Performance means sacrificing one or the other at some stage. Why can't I be able to achieve the design that I want? Why do I have to make sacrifices when it doesn't make sense for my business to do so, or my audience?

Joseph:

Well, the thing is, you don't need to make a huge sacrifice in instances like that. There are techniques that you need to use for video to make sure that your website performs how it should. 

You can have videos and a pretty website. But out of the box, (particularly on a lot of WordPress themes that buy from marketplaces) are trash when it comes to performance but look nice. 

At the end of the day, your website is an asset and needs the best performance it can for the best ROI for your business. 

James:

Well, you could load a straight HTML document with a couple of words on it and call it your website. But it's all black and white. If your audience lands on a website like that, they're going to have a pretty poor impression of your business.  

It will look like you've half-assed it. 

It could be the fastest loading site in the world. But if there is no design, there's no professionalism in the brand presence. It doesn't matter how well-performing it is. 

You're going to lose your audience. You're going to lose the purpose of why this thing exists. 

Your purpose is to engage your audience and inform them about what you do. This will encourage them to take a positive action towards achieving the objectives of your business online. So what do you have to say to that, Joe?

Joseph:

A good example of performance over design is Amazon. They've got some design, but it isn't the core of what they do. Their core is making money and growing their business, focusing heavily on performance. 

They did a study (I can't remember the exact numbers), where they lost tens of millions of dollars because the speed was off by a millisecond. This was a hugely critical aspect of their business. 

So if you've got a website, and by the way, it doesn't need to be just text on the page in black and white. You can have a nice design and performs well. But performance has to actually be part of the plan of the website. 

It can't be something that you think of afterwards. 

Otherwise, you then have to re-engineer certain parts to make sure that it is performing. Website performance is incredibly valuable and you can have both. It comes down to how much you want to sacrifice.

James:

That was well said. This underlines the importance of what a  professional web design agency should do for you. Because it's actually not a debate of design versus performance. 

Do you want to have a nice design or do you want to have a site that loads fast? 

No, you can actually have a beautiful, well-designed website that performs and loads quickly if you know what you're doing. And this isn't something that is done once the website has been built or while it's being built. 

This goes down to the fundamental planning aspects. 

That's the website strategy for you to be able to create a website that's visually appealing to your audience. But also performs and produces a result for your business. This is something that is a skill. This takes experience. This takes know-how in how to do this well.

A lot of websites that have been DIY'd, or businesses that come to us with sites that look good but perform terribly is because of what they haven't considered. They've looked at it purely from a design-only angle. They haven't considered the performance angle. 

Or you get very fast loading websites that look terrible because they typically have good development capability, but terrible design capability, which also then misses the mark. 

You can have both, and this is what we do at Web3. We have both design and development talent in-house. This allows us to bring both worlds together and create something that works the best in both worlds for our clients and our customers.

So that's another episode of the Web3 Marketing Debate Show. As always, I hope you learned something new and we'll be back soon with another debate around creativity versus data. 

I can't wait to announce this one and yes, rumble in the ring with you, Joseph.

Joseph:

Can't wait. Bring it on, James.

James:

Awesome. All right. That's a wrap. We'll see you again real soon.