I read a recent article asking if anyone really cares about the design of a website. The basic premise was that the design should not get in the way of the site. This is correct, but I’ll take it a step further.
Consider the last site that you found yourself amazed at how good it looked. Go ahead – think hard about the site…what you can’t? No pretty sites coming to mind? Don’t worry – you’re perfectly normal. Designers, especially those fresh from college, will try to tell you how important the design of your site is – and they’re wrong. (Their professors who told them that pretty sites are important are wrong too.)
When I taught college classes on website development, I’d ask the same question to my students. Rarely could these students who were studying design, come up with a “good” site off the top of their head. Most could go out to the Internet and search for a pretty website and find something – but we don’t recognize these things we we stumble upon them.
How good a site does has little to do with how “good” it looks. How good your site performs is based on two different aspects that I will look at separately in two different articles. First, the design of your website should not get in the way. The second is that your website needs to perform a useful task.
I’ll explain more in each of the follow up articles as to what I mean, and how I define a successful website.
About Walter Wimberly