Good Design Does Wonders
It’s He Said, She Said week this week which means that tomorrow there’ll be an article here on the site by Elizabeth Gast (and I’m posting my thoughts on the same topic on her site), because of that, there will not be a design themed Tuesday post! Instead, I’m going to combine the business side with the design side today on the subject of good design and what it can do for you. Nowadays, we are very aware of design however most of the time just not conscious of that. Say for example that we go to a company’s website and are interested in their services/products. Let’s also say that they are a smaller company that have their products available through order on their site only. When you come to the website, it looks rather old and not really like most of the sites you visit. That is exactly what I am talking about.
Design-awareness lives subconsciously
I really do believe that our design-awareness always is turned on and is somehow active. In the example above, we would draw the conclusion straight away, almost subconsciously that the site might not be legitimate and thus, we probably wouldn’t order out of fear that it is a fraud. The question now stands, how many times have you done like that? We naturally make decisions based on how things appeal to us, be it food, music or design. By not acknowledging this, you run a big risk!
Keep the Design Good and on Par With the Rest!
The solution is pretty simple. Keep your design at a high-quality, a quality that matches what everyone is seeing out and about every day! You grow accustomed to what you see every single day and anything that is of lesser quality will be thought of as less professional. So basically, if you cannot design on that level yourself, hire someone who can! This can be a secure way of gaining customers.
If you are the designer, you definitely want to make sure that you think about everything that could eventually be used. Think of possibly odd form additions to the site, useage of RTE editor HTML tags that a client might use without knowing that you say, haven’t styled that tag. If you can make sure your client’s website looks brilliant as well being worry-less for your client, you are in for a good ride!
About Erik Bernskiold
Erik is the owner of the Bernskiold Media Group and is a Web Designer, Photographer and Software-Trainer. He is interested in all aspects of graphic design and media production as well as gadgets and technology.
Most podcasts about the Creative Suite is about the tools in the apps. We put out a weekly podcast that mixes the tools with real-life techniques that help you learn to use the Creative Suite, creatively.
Well written, Erik! There’s a ton of sites out there that could use some re-defining to be able to meet the expectation of their customers. On the other hand – I’ve been thinking about many of the really “old” sites that have a history to tell about the web and its development over time. Maybe there’s a point on preserving some of them – at least for the generations to come…
Definitely. Or to actually meet the expectation that the customers may not have thought of as well.
Still, I mean, the old sites could be archived. It’s the point of web.archive.org as well and can easily be saved on a server. They don’t really need to be live do they?