Inter Studio

The majority of website designers focus wrongly on website designing practices that are shaped towards enhancing the visual experience. This leads to websites that are poorly designed to serve the needs of the visitor or the client. Website design technology may have progressed in the past five years; it is hard to say the same for the actual quality of website design. For all the advancement in technology, the progress is yet to translate into more sensible website design practices.

Yes, websites designed in the past 5 years certainly look a lot better and have more wow features like impressive effects, stunning graphics and clever videos. But that doesn’t mean as websites they perform any better in satisfying the needs of the visitor or the website owner. In fact very often all these effects, graphics and flash videos while enhancing the visual appeal of the website actually make the website worse in terms of performance. By performance we mean how well the website satisfies the objectives it should have been designed to meet.

When you are looking to have a website designed or redesigned the first thing you need to establish is what are the objectives of the website? The objective is obviously to deliver a pre-promised value to your website visitor; this may range from free information to shopping solutions or paid services of a wide variety. You may in turn derive value from this process either directly in form of a B2C transaction, or in the case ‘free’ websites and blogs, through ads.

What is the purpose of the website design?

Is the purpose to :

1.            Stun visitors with a jaw dropping graphics and effects?

2.            Get good reviews for your website design from other web designers?

3.            Inform and educate visitors?

4.            Attract the right visitors interested in what the website has to offer?

5.            Sell products or services?

6.            Capture leads or subscribers?

If you want evidence of the extent to which website design practioners focus on the visual appeal of the website design rather than functionality, you only have to look at the dozens of websites that showcase what they consider to be good website designs.

These showcase sites for good website design feature 1,000′s of websites submitted by web designers that get reviewed and voted for largely by their peers, or so it would seem. Some, but not all of these showcase websites state what they regard as good website design in their submission guidelines.

Ingredients for Ideal Website Design

An ideal equation for quality website designing is:

Quality Design = Visual + Technical + Creativity

Note here the emphasis is on the visual appearance, technical wiz bangs and the creative merit.

Observation, however, would tell you that web designers focus too much on creating good looking websites that appeal to their peers.

Deciding on what is a good website design also depends on whether you want a website that looks good or one that’s designed for a purpose and to satisfy some clearly defined objectives. If you want a website that does more than just look good then you need to look a bit more closely at the design of your website, because just looking good is never good enough, at least not for me.

We’ll continue to bring you more tips related to website designing and social media marketing, so keep reading!