Goal-Driven Web Design

Understanding the reasons for building a website in the first place can give you a lot of insight into the specific strategies you should be using when planning it.

Here are some examples of reasons for starting or overhauling your business website:

• Present a stronger brand identity
• Increase the number of leads gathered through the website
• Generate online sales
• Automate or simplify current business processes
• Provide support to existing customers
• Bring additional value to customers

Forty Media also has a very good article on Setting a Web Design Budget:

If you think about the Web as merely an expense that you’re obligated to deal with, then you’re probably not going to get much of a return on it, and you might even better off without one.

However, if you consider the Web to be an opportunity to invest in your business, then you’re more likely to a significant return on that investment.

Sometimes a little change of perspective can make all the difference.

Well, just because everybody else is blogging about it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t.

When I’m formatting content for a site I’m always Googling for the proper codes for encoding character entities. Copyright symbols. Trademark symbols. Curly quotation marks. Em and en dashes. Etc. This neat little online tool will be invaluable in the future. Just type in something similar to what you’re looking for and “Bob’s your uncle.”

Here is a perfect example of what I was intimating in the previous post when I said, “I’m generally of the mind that it’s almost impossible to come up with a 100% unique design. No matter what, pieces of your work can be found somewhere else on the web.” This is especially true when you keep the design fairly simple as I have here on SSDD. So what’ve we got here?

• Fat, mostly monochromatic header bar with left-leaning logo. Check.
• Thin navigation bar with a gradient fill under the header. Check.
• Faded fat diagonal lines under have bar, in background of main content area. Check.
• Footer bar at bottom, matching header color. Check.

To be clear, I am not accusing this web site owner of layout theft any more than he can accuse me of theft. Quite the contrary. The layouts are very basic but usable, and the design elements (gradients and diagonals) are du rigeur in web design today.

It’s just a very small design world. And with the popularity of CSS Design Showcases (e.g., the Daily Slurp) it’s getting smaller. The most important thing is to create the design that is most appropriate for the site in question. I think they both work.

Stealing is Never O.K.

I’m all for looking at other designers for inspiration in my own work, but I always try and take an “idea” from another designer…never the actual design.

I’m generally of the mind that it’s almost impossible to come up with a 100% unique design. No matter what, pieces of your work can be found somewhere else on the web. But that’s not the issue here.

Looking at the code, you can see that they didn’t even remove parts of the code from the Cork’d website they just commented it out. This is a blatant ripoff.

Most site thefts aren’t this blatant. Only real morons leave code unique to the stolen site in the files.

There are good reasons never to design on spec (emphasis mine):

1. It’s a lot of unpaid work.
2. Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving. Unless the RFP spells out site goals and user needs in phenomenal detail, you can’t create an appropriate design because you don’t yet know what problems need to be solved. Even if the RFP spells out goals and needs, it’s unlikely that the people who wrote it know what all their site’s problems are. Most times you need to talk to people who use the site and study how they use it to get a handle on what works and doesn’t. It also helps to interview stakeholders. Doing that at your own expense is risky business at best.
3. It’s unsafe for agency and potential client alike.

Couldn’t agree more. It also devalues the web design industry and negatively effects your peers as well.

Full article here.