If You Haven’t Heard Of UX Design, Then You’re Already Falling Behind

According to tech blog Mashable, web design has gone the way of the woolly mammoth. RIP!

Of course, the only thing the site’s “Web design is dead” headline really highlights is just how desperate blogs are to earn those precious clicks with hyperbolic headlines and sketchy conclusions. The listicle argues that small businesses are using Facebook pages in lieu of traditional homepages (they’re not). Not only that, but in a strange twist, the author claims that Artificial Intelligence is already designing websites, as if Skynet finally came online, but rather than kick starting the inevitable robot uprising, it’s designing web pages for a plumbing company in Tucson.

Obviously, Mashable is bound by click-driven economics, and digital publications don’t earn traffic with calm, measured analysis. Unfortunately, the listicle buries the lede — web design isn’t dead, web designers are just putting a new focus on UX custom web design.

UX stands for user experience, and it’s a form of custom web design that incorporates a wide array of online services, such as Search Engine Optimization, mobile-friendly layouts and apps, video production, brand development, social media marketing, and more. UX custom web design allows your web development team to focus on improving the experience of your customers, and it’s a necessary evolution in web services.

For far too long, SEO services, social media marketers, and web developers worked in isolation. And so your custom website designers would craft a sleek, flashy site that was a disaster from an SEO perspective, while SEO experts would help generate content that was only interesting to Google’s search crawlers.

Now, with UX custom web design, all of these elements can be folded together. That’s because in 2015, it’s not enough to have a custom website design. About 34% of smartphone owners primarily go online using their phone, which means you need a mobile-friendly site to get their business. And with global mobile ad spending expected to more than triple in size by 2016, your website needs every competitive edge it can get to stand out from the digital crowd.

So is web design dead? Of course not. Remember, 47% of users expect your page to load in no more than two seconds. Small businesses ignore the basics of web design at their peril, but those who ignore the latest trends in custom web design will surely get left behind.

And in 2015, that means focusing not just on business, or social media, or custom web design, or SEO, but finding a strategy that incorporates all these services in tandem. Welcome to the era of UX design.