During the same year Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin and Hobbes debuted (1985), the first domain name ever was registered as symbolics.com. Then, on August, 6 1991, the first website went online. And ever since then, more and more of our activities have been heading online. Today, website design is an indispensable asset for any company. Without a website, a business will flounder and ultimately fail. And it’s not just about having any old website. Increasingly, users are becoming much more concerned with good web design. From social media marketing to custom ecommerce solutions, the best web design companies can offer your business a wide variety of services to keep you ahead of the competition.

The primary service that a top web design company will offer is (perhaps obviously) superior website design. Given the amount of time people spend online, they are increasingly becoming concerned with their experience using a website. Many users are fickle and will leave a website if they are having trouble navigating it. In fact, 23 percent of online shoppers attribute their dissatisfaction with a website to its pages loading slowly. With the superior design top website designers offer, you won’t have to worry about losing customers due to something as simple as frustration with your website design.

In addition to great desktop web design, a web design company can help you take advantage of the increasing trend towards mobile internet usage. Everyday, more and more people are accessing the internet from their smartphones and tablets, so it is becoming increasingly important to have a well-designed mobile website as well. In fact, by 2014, mobile internet usage is expected to overtake desktop internet usage. And many users will simply refuse to visit a website if it doesn’t have a competent mobile version.

A great web design company will offer much more than just well-designed websites, though. Web design companies will also help you to market your website with SEO and social media marketing. The best web design companies will employ social media marketing experts to help market your brand on all of the major social networks. This will help your company to be part of the over 3.5 billion pieces of content that are shared each week on Facebook.

If your business is more focused on ecommerce, or you just want to add an online component to an existing retail store, website design companies can also offer custom ecommerce solutions that are tailored to your company. The best web design companies that offer custom ecommerce solutions will be able to guarantee that all payment information exchanged is safe and secure. Additionally, custom ecommerce solutions provided by web design companies should also offer payment processing services that allow your customers to pay with credit or debit, making it easy for them to make their purchases. And custom ecommerce solutions would be nothing without robust and easy to navigate shopping cart software. The best web design companies will offer shopping cart software that will make it easy for you to administer products, and easy for your customers to find what they are looking for.