One thing that you must understand about any good web design company is that its most important work is often invisible. This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, the whole point of developing a website for your company or yourself is to influence the first visual and information impressions that people get when they search for someone like you. But these impressions are often more subtle and nuanced than the average person realizes. And this is why it may not be advisable for an amateur designer to personally take on the project of developing and launching a new website.

To be clear, if you wish to do so, there are more tools at your disposal than ever before. You don’t need to work for a web design company in order to navigate WordPress or Wix or any of the other popular platforms for template-based web design. There is sure to be a much greater learning curve for the average person than for a web design company whenever unfamiliar features and design elements emerge. But on the whole, both amateurs and professionals can create sites that have a basic sense of order and aesthetic quality.

But if the professionals in question are good at their jobs, the similarities should end pretty quickly. There are countless unseen elements that go into effective work by a professional web design company. They may include image titles and meta-data that sets the stage for SEO, or design elements that set the stage for a tailored digital marketing campaign. This is especially true if the web design company in question is also providing these additional services to the same client.

At the same time, a good web design company brings an understanding of human psychology – and specifically consumer psychology – to the building of a commercial website. The effects of that understanding aren’t strictly invisible. But they may only be decipherable to a trained eye. While the ordinary person might see two sites as having different but equally attractive color schemes, an expert can be expected to recognize which of those schemes acts upon the most relevant emotions and psychological processes of the target audience.

A recent article at Business2Community examined some elements of the psychology of web design, and the interaction between color and emotion was the first to be mentioned. The article mentions how specific base colors operate in company branding – blue to evoke a feeling of trust and red to suggest excitement, for instance. But this only just hints at the ways in which specific hues and intricate color combinations can guide visitors’ perceptions in the right direction.

What’s more, the color scheme is only one of many elements that a professional web design company can use to exploit human psychology, provided it understands this topic better than the average person. In consultation with its clients, a good web design company should be able to show off its portfolio in a way that shows off this understanding. In this way, the company can shine light upon the otherwise invisible deficiencies of a simple, superficial, amateur-made website.