Visit my website design services at http://www.jesseyoung.com
Want to know the secret for getting the best work possible from a small business web site designer? Trust us. And please don’t try to micromanage.
OK, so you might be thinking, “This is my web site and I want it the way I want it. I have every right to tell the designer what I want.” And that’s very true. However, there’s also a reason you hired a professional web site designer, just as there is a reason you use a professional mechanic to fix your car. Experience, training, and an understanding of the web design process as a whole, just to name a few.
So while it’s perfectly appropriate to provide input, remember that you’re not the web designer – otherwise you would have just done the project yourself (after the steep learning curve of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphic optimization, and the differences of how various browsers display a web site.)
I bring this topic up because of a situation that most web designers (and perhaps designers of any kind) encounter on occasion: A client hires a designer based on the fact that they like that designer’s previous work. The designer presents a design concept and the client approves it, saying how much they love it. Then a curious thing happens – the client starts suggesting “minor tweaks”. By the time the process is over, the initial design can turn into a cobbled together Frankenstein’s monster.
Not only may some of these suggestions be less than visually appealing (trust us, a web site with pink text over a purple and green striped background usually doesn’t look very professional for a doctor’s office…), there may be practical reasons they don’t work. For instance, if a client suggested I move the navigation bar (the buttons) down to the bottom of the screen, I would probably try to steer them away from that for reasons of usability – many visitors to the site, depending on their monitor size, would only see the navigation when they scroll further down the page. Thus, some people may never even see that there are other pages to click to. These are the types of things that an experienced web site designer will know.
None of this means that you should blindly agree to everything your web designer shows you. If the design is simply not what you want , you should say so at the beginning. Much better to get that out of the way rather than trying to micromanage the layout into something that doesn’t work.
Just remember that the web site design process should be a collaborative effort between the client and the designer – but the designer is the one with the expertise in this field. Do your research. Make sure that the person or company you’re hiring to design your website has a history of creating the types of sites that you’re after; make sure that you’re both a “good fit”; and make sure that your designer is someone that you’re comfortable putting your trust in.
