Web Design

Whether or not you end up one of our customers, let us give you a piece of invaluable advice for nothing. You should be immediately suspicious if a graphic design company claims they can make you a website that will get you seen, or better still, get you sales.

The reason? A great deal of graphically-oriented web design is the ultimate demonstration of the fallacy of style over substance. People from a graphic design background will very often focus on an attractive design and pay very little attention to the way a website actually works. While in recent years courses with a proper well-informed multimedia focus have alleviated this somewhat, the profession still treats the web like a blank canvas, and it’s hurting developers, hurting customers, and most importantly of all, hurting users.

The Web is Not a Magazine

The most fundamental error we observe in web design is treating a website as though it were a few pages of a glossy magazine. The web writing is atrocious. Images take eons to load. Google’s webmaster guidelines, which should be treated as holy writ for web marketing, are trampled upon. Introductory text, which users don’t read, borders on meaningless. Viewing in other web browsers breaks the entire site.

People come to your website to get something done, and most of them will want to do it as soon as possible and then get away from your website and do something else — if they don’t give up first out of frustration — and the best graphic design in the world is not going to make them stay.

Light at the End of the Web

This isn’t a revolutionary point of view. Tools like WordPress have been pushing web-friendly publishing methods for years now. Web-based programming frameworks like Ruby on Rails and the Zend Framework are helping to dig Dreamweaver and its ilk a shallow grave. But in the meantime, don’t fall into the trap of a graphic designer’s website, because chances are, you’re wasting your money. Let us help you get on the right track.