When you think of an ugly website, you might think of blocks of text, comic sans, too many colors, or functions that fail to account for user experience. But these sites don’t just make your eyes bleed — they fail to achieve the goal of the site in the first place (unless, of course, your goal is to be the world’s worst website ever).

A website should be beautiful, but more importantly, it should be beautiful in order to accomplish your business goals. If you’re a photographer, your website should showcase your best work and lead others to request bookings. If you’re a car dealer, your website should capture the attention of potential customers and ultimately lead them into your dealership.

As shoppers become more and more comfortable online, they have higher expectations for the companies they interact with online. With that in mind, the marriage of design, user experience and purpose has become increasingly important.

Don’t Forget About the User

According to the Mary Meeker Internet Trends report, “consumers’ expectations that they can get what they want with ease and speed will continue to rise.” If a site isn’t easy to navigate, 94 percent will abandon the site, and if it doesn’t load in less than five seconds, 62 percent are gone. Users are also increasingly mobile; in fact, 1 in 4 car purchasers turn to mobile to research vehicles every day. Providing a responsive and easily navigable website experience is essential to keeping shoppers on your website, whether they’re on mobile or a high-end widescreen monitor.

A Match Made in Heaven: Purpose and Design

Art is beautiful, design is beauty with purpose. A website shouldn’t look nice simply to attract customers, (though that is important), it should drive consumers to action. Marrying your design to what your consumer wants immediately increases the odds that they will choose your dealership. When car dealership sites personalize their content based on their shoppers (e.g. personalization), dealers experienced a 28 percent increase in likely buyers.1 In addition, featuring click-to-call buttons or other actionable features drives more measurable ROI than your designer saying “Well, it looks great!”

Changing your design to align with your business goals, like swapping out content to align with the marketing in your showroom or featuring specials on your homepage, allows you to use design to help boost your bottom line. Being able to do that quickly and simply means one less headache for you.

The days of just being online are over. It’s not enough to just be present, you have to be competitive. And in order to do so, you need to aim for the trifecta: user experience, purpose and design.

Does your website measure up? Check out our Next Gen Websites and see how the combination of these three elements can make a difference for your dealership.

1 CDK Data Science, 2016