Web Design is all-encompassing
June 13, 2007 on 5:24 pm
Filed Under:Web
In my many years in the industry, I’ve found that the term “Web Design” really is all-encompassing when it comes to referring to almost anything web-related.
Think about it, even if you were to utilise our services purely for SEO purposes, to do it properly we’d still need to alter your site design. HTML and CSS seem to be the best ways to optimise a site these days, and we’re good at them, but technically they involve Web Design.
Back in the day, “web design” meant that we had a guy who knew Photoshop (this was probably around v 4.0 or even 3.0) and he would make pretty pictures of websites. They were flat documents, JPGs usually, and we showed 3 of them to the client so that they may choose 1, from which we would design their site.
I lost count of the number of times that the coders had to explain to him that what he’d designed simply couldn’t be done for most browsers (this we’d even heard of CSS, of course). He knew rudimentary HTML and that was about it, with no real yearning to learn any more.
But, things change, and Web Designers now have to incorporate the whole enchilada. Photoshop isn’t something that you put on your resume any more, it’s just assumed that you know how to use it. The same with HTML and Stylesheets nowadays. If you consider yourself a Web Designer, it is pretty much assumed that you can write your own stylesheet and design a site in HTML, either from a Photoshop file or without.
HTML has even changed with the pervasiveness of WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver, people don’t even really need to understand how it all works or what each individual tag represents. Once again dating myself, but I remember writing code in Notepad, before uploading it via Command Prompt FTP, and having it break because I forgot to type the </body> and </html> tags at the bottom of my document.
How does one create GOOD Web Design these days then?
Usability is key, of course, but does a year of education involving colour schemes mean that I know what ALL of my users will like?
Nup, of course not. When I go Christmas shopping for my kids, the first thing I go for in the Toy Store is something that I’LL like, and then I think about whether or not it’s appropriate for them. My kids have enough similar tastes, that it doesn’t matter that they’re 6, 4 and 5 months, I’ll probably come pretty close to something that they’ll love.
The same goes for decent Web Design. Whether you’re wearing a “coder” hat, an “accessibility” hat, or a “design” hat, you’ll still be designing with a mindset of what YOU like first, and then your users second.
The trick, as with almost anything, is adaptability. Roll with the punches. When these two don’t match up, you absolutely MUST go with the Greater Good.
The tagline I’ve heard an SEO use is one that applies to almost any aspect of Web Design, or even the web in general.
Experiment, Analyse, Adjust.
Watch this space for those things. I like Chocolate Quatros, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to keep offering them to my child that doesn’t like peanuts.