After nearly 10 years of developing websites of all shapes and sizes, across multiple market segments, over mountains of fads and hacker infested waters, I have come to one conclusion Web Design is Over-rated!

Now before the minions of the W3C and their lovely ‘utopia’ of compliant code web wackos start to gather to hunt me down for such heresy, let me explain. I have spent many years in the trenches of the web development world and still enjoy creating digital art in my spare time. I am still at arm’s length with my web development business and have a vested interest in the industry in general. I am not so sure this ‘rant’ is aimed at you.
I believe it may be the web site owners and their perceptions at work here.

Sure, I have now alienated my clients as well as my industry peers. Sounds like another normal day for me. Let’s just hope we’re all galvanized now to get onto the meat of the issue.

Start with a relative value

No matter if you’re a web developer or looking to have your website built, understand the Web Design for what it is, a design.

It is not;

1. Server reliability
2. a Back end application
3. a Customer support mechanism
4. a Sales or ‘call to action’ tool
5. a Transaction processing system
6. a SEO or other Search marketing tool
7. an entertainment system (FLASH kiddies)

In short, It is NOT an overbearing factor of importance. I am NOT discounting it as a function of the process, so put down the mouse and give me a second before writing your own RANT. I am trying to give it a place that can be related to in the over-all scheme of things when developing a web site.

Your web site design is going to be ‘part of the team’ not an all-star prima-Donna. We need to utilize the site design to achieve goals inline with the over-all site/business model and get the most from it. This is NOT about looking pretty. Everything in your design ‘eye’ should be geared towards the end goal of the site and conversions thereto.

Some areas of interest

To get a better feel for using design outside of mere looks I have grabbed a few concepts out of the air to try and expand on my point. You really do need to step outside of the deisgn eye and come up with ways you can get the most out of the design aspects of your web site design and development.

1. Split testing and MVT; Split testing and multi-Variance testing are a function of increasing a sites conversions based on changing various elements on a page/document. Testing one’s page layouts against a known ‘control page’ can bring to light many lessons in effective design. A must learn for the serious web designer.


2. Usability - getting to the conversion; Simply enough a site that has inhibitors such as heavy FLASH or weighty graphics, poor internal navigation, cluttered content, make it very difficult to even get the user to the conversion process. This has it’s obvious problems that can not only not help the situation, but be a factor in the site’s ultimate failure. Design does play a heavy role.


3. Navigating for Bots; Organic search traffic is responsible for up to 80% of a websites traffic. Poor navigation, as touched on above, can also be bad for search engine spiders looking to index the information contained on the site. While poor code cannot generally affect a web sites rankings in the search engines, poor structure can present indexing issues as can on page java script, FLASH and other ‘toys’ of the average web designer. Not traffic, no need for a design or even a site for that matter.


4. Building the Brand; One important area for the design world, online or offline, is Brand development. A design is a personality. It is used in creating trust and confidence in your user base. Decide on the personality you wish to take out to the world with the site and ensure you design to the end user NOT to the designer or even the clients ‘personal picks’. Get yourself a focus group and that is the data to decide the brad. I weight it above my own or the clients personal feelings anyways.

Wrapping it up; No i-Frame included

The main thing I want folks to take way from this piece, outside of the fact I need to get out more, is to look at web design from a deeper perspective than ‘a pretty picture’. If you’re thinking about hiring a web designer or if you are one, ensuring that the design elements of your site play their role to the fullest is paramount to success. If succeeding in the world of internet business was easy, everyone would be a success. That, is not the case.

Get the most out of the website design. Don’t let it be just ‘another pretty face’

David Harry has been creating custom website designs since 1998. His firm, Verve Developments, currently specializes in OsCommerce and Joomla development services..

No comments yet. Be the first one to comment.