Some people think great website design work is expensive. On the surface, this is true since you generally get what you pay for. However, how often do we stop to think about how expensive bad design can be?

Bad design leads to frustrated website visitors who cannot find what they want. If you are a government entity with no competition, this means your constituents will end up having to call your office to get the information they need. This means that you will have to hire more people to cover the phones and spend more time on support issues. This costs more money. I love my community and I am very loyal to Indiana but the State of Indiana website is an example of an extremely poorly-designed website. Finding anything on this site is practically impossible. I know… I’ve tried! After spending 15 minutes on the site looking for something, I ended up having to call.

It’s even worse for businesses. If you’re a business, your customers have plenty of choices. If their needs aren’t met on your website or if it doesn’t inspire confidence, they won’t call – they will simply go elsewhere. This is expensive because that could have been a sale.

If you think great website design is expensive, try bad design. It can be even more costly.