Remember how Dragnet used to begin? The names have been changed to protect the innocent. I’m doing the same to recount this all too often-told story from the front line of web design.
I get a call from a prospective client who spent thousands on a designer, let’s call them Out the Wa-Zoo Design. Wa-Zoo had great credentials, after all they had been designing magazine layouts for years. After spending thousands on a website, the client can’t figure out why their site ranks so low in the search engines and why they aren’t getting any business from their website. It’s the cry for help.
The sad news is that paying a lot for a website does not always indicate the quality of the end result.
Web Learning Curve Is Ongoing. Print and web are two very different mediums. I did print design work in tandem with web design projects and stopped three years ago. The web is a rapidly changing medium and those changes come from all directions: browser updates, client demand and expectations, advances in Web 2.0. If a designer is not keeping up with the Internet everyday, they can fall light-years behind. I refer print projects to graphic designers.
Code vs. Software. You can easily vet a designer by asking about their skill sets. Ask “What are your web skills?” and BEWARE of answers about software (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, CS3 or CS4, etc.). The Internet is viewed through browsers which read code. If your designer doesn’t read and write HTML and CSS, then how will they create browser-friendly websites? It’s likely that they won’t as they rely their software to do it for them which are notorious for invalid code!
Heavy on Images. One client in need of a web revision had 23 images on the home page. You wouldn’t suspect it because all a web visitor saw was a logo and 2 photos. The designer, whose focus was producing fabulous print pages, had created one big image for the entire page, then chopped it up into 23 smaller images to create the web page. Even the white space was created with images! This caused the web pages to download very, very, slowly and visitors were forced to wait. They also had a website that couldn’t be updated without extensive image retouching. A far cry from a lean mean web machine!
Pretty, But Does it Work? A terrific website is a balance between beauty and brains. You can’t sacrifice one for the other! I see my fair share where beauty is number one and the backend basic HTML code is a disaster. When the technical basics have been skipped or ignored, a site can look dramatically different on different computers, or in different browsers. The client who loses out when technology is sacrificed: poor search engine results, a website that breaks apart in some browsers, twitchy or unpredictable functionality, slow performance, and code errors that limit the site’s usage.
The Solution. How do you avoid these pitfalls? Ask! Don’t just ask whether your designer uses HTML because most websites do.
- Ask if they use tables or style sheets.
- Ask if they validate their code.
- Ask to see an active, online sample of their work.
Design to Spec strives to balance beauty and brains for sites that not only look good but will WORK for you! Don’t hold on to this article… please share it with a friend on Facebook or Twitter. Everyone deserves a proper functioning and well designed website.
