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Often, when people talk about how the internet has revolutionised the world, they talk in terms of entrepreneurship and communication, and about how the internet allows us to be instantly global and able to access services twenty four hours a day. What people don’t talk about so often is the role that web design has played in online innovation over the years.

This is a shame because without web designers and developers, even the best online business idea in the world wouldn’t be able to take off. This isn’t to say that web design is the most important facet of the internet; the reason the online world works so well is because of the collaborative nature of it and the fact that many different people have a part to play. Entrepreneurs need to have ideas before a great web design can be created, after all.

However, if Facebook or Twitter didn’t have a good web design, for instance, it’s highly unlikely that those websites would be as successful as they are, no matter how good the ideas were in the first place. Plus, almost every single new business that launches now has its own website. Having a high quality website for your business is now seen as something you have to do – it’s almost a mark of professionalism and authenticity. More people now search online for businesses than look in the Yellow Pages. A website can make or break a company’s reputation.

All of this helps to demonstrate just how important web design is to online innovation and even the wider operations of companies. Another good example is the world of ecommerce: we are frequently told that we are spending ever more money online, largely because it’s a convenient to shop. Without good, easy to use web design, the process would be much more complicated and would have been much less likely to take off in the way that it has.

Also, branding is arguably more important now than it has ever been before. In particular, we can thank companies such as Apple and Google – which have extremely distinctive brands and have changed the way we do much of our business – for the fact that brands are now so vital. A large part of branding is about design and creating an image to represent a particular company or service. The fact branding is so essential means that web design is not just a commodity or service for hire anymore; often, web designers are partners in creating an online brand.

Web design becomes more important still when we consider how much has changed in the world of technology over the past few years. It wasn’t that long ago when Internet Explorer dominated the internet, which had a significant impact on how things were designed. Now, the diversification of platforms has in a way forced designers to be more innovative about how sites are put together; no platform can be neglected but sites have to perform to high standards across all of them. We cannot deny that this requires a special type of skill and ability to innovate in order to adapt to this new state of affairs.

This means that the world of web design is constantly evolving, in effect making the internet look good as it continues its development. Web design has to be responsive and adaptive to new developments in ecommerce and entrepreneurship; often changes need to be made quickly and new processes need to be developed. Web design is not just about aesthetics; it’s about the layers underneath, too. Other developments, such as Google algorithm updates, also need to be responded to so that sites can continue to perform highly and do well in the rankings.

All of these changes have led to web design developments such as HTML5, mobile sites and responsive web design – and things are still evolving, as they should. Online innovation is, in effect, a team game. It requires all the players to work together in order to create a working website that can be utilised by web users to benefit both them and businesses. Web design is not the only part of that but it is an important part of that. Without the user-friendly interface created by web designers, the internet would largely be just a collection of ideas struggling to properly be born.

By Chelsey Evans

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