I've been doing this Web thing for a long time; in fact, I built my first Web site in 1994, back in the days when the average American thought the Internet was an international criminal conspiracy. These days I do ecommerce consulting, which has provided me with the privilege of working with hundreds of companies over the last few years. I've worked for large companies such as Amazon and Zillow... and small companies such as the one-woman firm that arranges "fairy" tours of Ireland. I've seen it all!
One thing I've learned is that the vast majority of businesses start the Web-design process in completely the wrong place. They jump into the graphic-design part of the process, without asking a critical question.
What do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?
I know most businesses think they've already answered the question, but "we want the visitor to buy our product" is not a good answer. It's way too vague in most cases, much to general.
Specifically, what do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?
If you don't answer the question, you end up with a "throw it onto the site somewhere" process that really won't work well.
Here's an example. A firm I worked with wanted to sell a piece of software. Not having answered The Question, the site was a jumble of information and no real flow... no sales pitch or marketing message, no flow through which a visitor could be converted into a client.
It turned out that they had a great video showing the features of the product; in fact at one point the business owner said to me, "well, I guess it would really help if the visitor saw the video." Why, then, I asked, was the video hidden?
The video was reached by a small link near the bottom of the page on the right side. This was probably the most important sales element we had identified ... and yet it was hidden from the visitor. Sure, the visitor might stumble across it, but in most cases wouldn't. (As, in fact, was proven by their traffic logs; very few visitors ever reached the video.)
Now, had the company asked The Question right from the start, and fully discussed and explored it, before they built the site, they wouldn't be rebuilding the site! They would have realized that they had to push the video, that they had to make sure that every single visitor to the site know about it, and was encouraged to view it.
This, by the way, is why Web design is not about graphic design. A Web site is a piece of software--in many cases, a piece of marketing software. It is supposed to do something; interact with a visitor, and move that visitor along a path toward "conversion." That's a process, not color design, not graphic design. Graphic design is what you apply to a site once you've figured out the process.
[examiner]
One thing I've learned is that the vast majority of businesses start the Web-design process in completely the wrong place. They jump into the graphic-design part of the process, without asking a critical question.
What do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?
I know most businesses think they've already answered the question, but "we want the visitor to buy our product" is not a good answer. It's way too vague in most cases, much to general.
Specifically, what do you want the visitor to see and do when he arrives on the site?
If you don't answer the question, you end up with a "throw it onto the site somewhere" process that really won't work well.
Here's an example. A firm I worked with wanted to sell a piece of software. Not having answered The Question, the site was a jumble of information and no real flow... no sales pitch or marketing message, no flow through which a visitor could be converted into a client.
It turned out that they had a great video showing the features of the product; in fact at one point the business owner said to me, "well, I guess it would really help if the visitor saw the video." Why, then, I asked, was the video hidden?
The video was reached by a small link near the bottom of the page on the right side. This was probably the most important sales element we had identified ... and yet it was hidden from the visitor. Sure, the visitor might stumble across it, but in most cases wouldn't. (As, in fact, was proven by their traffic logs; very few visitors ever reached the video.)
Now, had the company asked The Question right from the start, and fully discussed and explored it, before they built the site, they wouldn't be rebuilding the site! They would have realized that they had to push the video, that they had to make sure that every single visitor to the site know about it, and was encouraged to view it.
This, by the way, is why Web design is not about graphic design. A Web site is a piece of software--in many cases, a piece of marketing software. It is supposed to do something; interact with a visitor, and move that visitor along a path toward "conversion." That's a process, not color design, not graphic design. Graphic design is what you apply to a site once you've figured out the process.
[examiner]
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