Karysima

Web Design – Looking Past the Pretty Graphics

Check out the portfolio sections of any web design site and it’s likely you’ll see a whole gallery of images showing off the company’s prowess with their graphics software of choice. It seems almost inevitable that a web design company will be more interested in showing off their actual designs rather than how websites perform and this can lead to companies not really understanding what their website is for.

So what is it for? Simple, as with any business investment, your website is there for one reason only – to make money. What else could you use it for? Every single private or public business should have just one thing on their mind – the accumulation of profits and every single business decision should bear this in mind and be the main goal of all investments, even the website.

Very often you will see a website brief that says “we want a clean layout with easy to navigate menus”.

Really? Surely you want a site that adds more to the bottom line. Sure, if that means it’s got neat menus then fine, but as a business, you should consider that even some terrible looking sites can make an awful lot of money and if a bad looking site rakes in the cash, then I’d be happy with that.

By simply approaching your design brief in this fundamentally different way, you can ensure that you get the best out of your web designers. But how can you tell the good guys from the bad? Here are a few tips.

Technology? Does it matter?

Is your designer more interested in waxing lyrical about the ‘back-end software’ they use? Are they proud of their achievements in handling twenty gigaflops of data? Do you care?

Choose a designer that talks business, not one that talks technology.

You want someone who is going to help you make more money and he won’t be able to do that if he’s knee deep in technology. A designer that spends all their time talking about their technological conquests will not understand business and so will not be able to react to your needs in a manner that will realistically help you.

Floating menus, fancy graphics?

Unfortunately, many designers are still more interested in how they can impress people through their use of flashy graphics. Flashy graphics don’t sell things (other than art perhaps), they simply show off the technical abilities of the designer again. The site should be about your customer, not about you or how great your designer is.

Music

Oh dear. So many sites force music upon you without the ability to turn it off. This really is a problem for many and you should give people the option of not being forced to listen to your compositions. Again, it’s just vanity – don’t use it, it will put customers off.

In summary

When choosing your designer, look past the fancy graphics and consider whether the sites they make are easy to use and tell you what you need to know. You shouldn’t have to ‘think’ and work out what a website does or sells, you should be able to tell within seconds. If you can do this with other people’s website in their portfolio, you can probably be sure yours will be easy to use too.

Difference between Graphic Designer and Web designer

It is like a roller coaster ride while differentiating between web design and graphic design to people with a very little knowledge of this both. While building a web site you need to recognize the distinct difference between the graphic design and web design.
 
Designer Centric web designing

Many times graphic designing and web designing is taken as the same. And this type of thinking is mostly prevalent with the firms transitioning from the graphic designing and multimedia designing into the web designing. They consider that graphic designing and web designing are like sibling from the same family as the brother and sister. But as accordingly they are analogous to second cousins. There are a few similarities between them but they have significantly more differences between them both. It becomes very challenging to get old school graphic designers to separate from their roots.

Graphic designing can be considered as the analogous to special effects in a movie.

It can make the visuals very amazing. But if you are not having a good story and dialogues it will not be of any worth how ever stunning the special effects are. High quality pictures and multimedia can never trump the high quality content.
 
Rise and fall of Flash

The rise and fall of the Flash was evidenced a few years ago. People wanted to take all the advantages of the usage of Flash in their websites. But that trend quickly died out. After experiencing this, the website owners quickly realized that Flash is not the best and ideal method for delivering content. Only a very few sites are able to deliver high quality content utilizing Flash in there website making. As a fact Flash has become the best and excellent delivery method for videos on web.

The fall of Flash was evidenced a few years ago. People wanted to use all the advantages of the flash in their respective websites at that time. But the trend quickly died. It was realized by the website owners that Flash is not the best and most ideal method for delivering content. There are very few websites that are able to display high quality content utilizing Flash. For web video also Flash has become an excellent delivery method.
 
Battle that goes on

When creating a website the designing firms are usually enduring a significant idea storm. Artists will usually look at the designing thing differently from the way the developers do look at. You get even more different options when you try adding the management into the mix. All of this ideas and opinions should be in the balance with the things that are best for the client and the users.
 
Simple Example

For an example take Google and yahoo, they together daily account for an approximately 150 Million searches. People go to these sites not for their prowess graphic design but they go because the sites are very easy to use and they allow access to an unbelievable amount of content.

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