Web Design Versus Web Build

Building a web site is one thing. Designing a web site is another. Web sites are becoming noticeably well designed. There are some incredible visual designs out there on the www, some of which will have been designed by top class professional designers at huge costs, some by just clever skilled individuals with a tremendous flair for design. Some however will have been designed by people who really should have stuck to what they really know!

Visual design is one thing but the whole structure of the site being well designed is something else. Building the site well is an important factor... just building it as a list of pages and links with bad navigation and clunky images and content, is not attractive at all. This loses you customers.

So what am I trying to say? Lets start with...

Visual design and structural design:

To create the best web site you need to be able to get ove tor your audience exactly where you are coming from and how you can assist them. A lot of that will be in the content and copywriting but I will leave that for now. However the instant visual experience and immediate answer to their wishes must be conveyed within a few seconds of the visitor finding your page. It is most important that it does a lot of this visually. That's where good graphic design comes in. The right colours, images and overall feel makes all the difference in keeping or losing your visitor.

Once you have captured the eye of your visitor, they will want to learn more and this is your chance to tell them all about it and steer them to that all important contact page or email form. If your site is clunky, difficult to navigate and the visitor has to spend most of their time wading about looking for those all important links... they will go somewhere else and you will have lost them... forever!

It used to be no more than three "clicks" to get to what you want, otherwise forget it. I think it should be no more than two "clicks" or even none at all... it just lands in thier lap! Ideal of course but not always the most practical. Mind you if the visitor is directed straight to a landing page... well that would be perfect. It captures them and gets their contact details and you are set to follow up a potential customer!

Building the site:

Just building the site is not enough. Time needs to be taken to formulate the whole process and put together a structural map on paper. Work out where the information will be displayed and make it easy to find. I have struggled with big web sites, like local government sites. They are probably "organic", put together by various people in different departments and because of this no one thinks out how the unsuspecting public may easily find that snippet of information or downloadable form etc etc. So you call them up and take up eveyone's time and complain too! (Have you ever noticed that the bigger the company gets, the less obvious their direct contact info is until it drops off somewhere to be lost forever? It's all down to "knowledgebases" and "tickets")

Some savvy people create the working structuring of the site in "wireframe" so you get the whole thing in front of the client to test, check and see if the recipient is happy before you go to all that trouble of loading in the content. A website wireframe is the best way to keep everything clear and in perspective whilst you are developing (building) a web site. The client knows exactly where he/she stands and what to expect. It is rather like doing a pencil sketch before the ruler and ink comes out. It will utilise basic boxes and simple lines to define the layout, image positions, navigation and text areas, before the actual content has been created at all.

So once the "design" has been done, visually and structurally, that's when you begin to "build" the site... and not until.

It will save you heartache and help you maintain your patience levels! I know... I have been there! Wasted hours and lost revenue!