Web design, like any openly subjective field that uses the term “design”, is as fluid as it comes. Trends, preferences, “best practices”, heck your mood all go into what YOU consider good website design. The look, the feel, the message conveyed by the visuals are all personal – BUT, and this is a big but, you must project a professional image that is easily navigated and compels site visitors to engage – your web design must do this for you.
So what exactly am I talking about? Let me start with negatives – Front Page is dead. Burn those words from your vocabulary and anything that looks like it comes from the Front Page era. If your web design looks like it’s from the 90’s, why on earth would I want to trust you with my business? If you can’t update your website’s design in over a decade, how well do you take care of improving your products or services?
Next, don’t be afraid of the word “template” design – be afraid of BAD templates. You need a professional image. You dress well, you make your customer-facing employees dress well, why would you select a web design from some cheapie “build your own” site that looks as low-rent as the monthly payment? Your business isn’t low-rent, is it? A contemporary web design template that looks fresh, is professionally personalized to your business, has all the modern features like social networking feeds and icons, fresh site content feeds (news, events, blog summaries etc) is fine. Just make sure the imagery and logo are up to snuff. Nothing upsets me more than seeing a great web design let down by a low-res logo and imagery!
Next, do you want to trust your 5MP camera for all your brochures, packaging, or tradeshow collateral? Sure you don’t, so why would you trust your aunt’s great nephew’s girlfriend’s brother to design your website? Does he/she/it have any understanding of business processes, web best practices, or conversion paths? If you want to be found on the web you need to forget about having a site trapped in Flash – it was cool 8 years ago, it’s annoying today. You also need to forget about doorway pages or “enter” pages – they weren’t cool, ever. Don’t stand in the way of your potential customer. Your web design should funnel the site visitor to an action quickly and efficiently. Have diverse product offerings? How you design the website is crucial to not alienating different market segments. Your friend Bob who learned some basic HTML at the learning annex probably doesn’t quite get it, why would you trust your businesses future to Bob?
OK, now that the negatives are out of the way let me address the positives…
Sorry, it’s tough. Web design is just too subjective. I guess my closing advice is to make sure you are doing everything in your power to pay attention to market trends, what your competitors’ websites look like, what your analytics tell you about your conversion and bounce rates, etc. Make sure you have budgeted some minor freshening each year, a website’s shelf life is not that long. Your web design is probably stale, dated, or worse – at least make sure you’re site is built to 1024×768 resolution! Nothing says old and cheap like 640×480 layout (that hasn’t been cool since what, Windows 95?).
There, hope I gave you some things to think about. Please note, I’m not a web designer, nor a developer – I’m a sales guy who has a beef with bad web design that impedes your ability to sell properly. For more information on what our professional design team can do for you please read our general design page, our website design page, or contact us for more information.
