Posted on September 22, 2011 | No Comments »
A while back I had a conversation with a client who had hired me to build a website for him. We were talking about the home page of his website.
We discussed the home page for quite a while, and it was easily one of the most productive conversations I’ve ever had about a home page of a website. The cool thing is we barely talked about the look of the page at all.
We were talking about what content needed to be, and we determined that the prime real estate on the page had to be dedicated to accomplishing 2 particular goals. Not coincidentally, these 2 goals were also the goals of the website as a whole.
In other words, we knew the overall goals of the website were A and B, so we needed to determine what we could do right up front on the home page to communicate the ideas that were at the heart of those goals. Eventually we got into talking about particular tools and techniques: “Maybe we should put an image slider here. What if we do some large text here?” And so on.
We figured out how to organize the page, what to display, where to display it, and how to display it. We eventually talked about the look too. And when we did, the ideas came fairly easily, because they flowed naturally from what we were trying to get across with the content on the page.
Most people come into a website design project way more concerned with how the home page will look than what it needs to accomplish. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of cases where people hardly cared about other parts of the site as long as the home page looked good.
I can see where they’re coming from. Home pages are important, to say the least, and the client in the above conversation ended up with a nice looking one. But beyond the aesthetics, I think he ended up with a really effective home page because he talked to his web designer about what the page should accomplish, not just what it should look like.
Posted on June 30, 2011 | No Comments »
Google just launched a new social media product/platform called Google+. You can read about it on this Google blog post and thousands of other places on the web.
Will it be successful? Will it crush Facebook or kill Twitter? I don’t know. My hunch is that people who really like Facebook will still prefer Facebook and people who love Twitter will still prefer Twitter, but I haven’t used Google+ yet and I’m not that into making predictions.
It’s hard to play fortune teller when it comes to the social media landscape. MySpace used to be huge, but it sold the other day for “only” $35 million. If that sounds like a lot of money, consider this paragraph from The Guardian:
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation bought Myspace in 2005 for $580m. In 2006 Google signed a $900m deal to sell ads on Myspace; by 2007 it had 300m registered users and was being valued at $12bn. But the social network was subsequently crushed by Facebook, which launched a year after Myspace.
With that history, $35 million sounds like a joke. (You can find a more complete history of MySpace’s valuation in this article from The Atlantic.)
With the social media world being so fluid, it’s important to have your website (the stuff at your domain name, like www.goodwebwork.com) as your home base. That way you can do what you need to do with all the third-party social media sites but always have a place where people can find you year after year. That’s your website. It’s still useful. Maybe more than ever.
Posted on June 25, 2011 | No Comments »
Sometimes when a web designer and a web design client are working on the initial design of a website, the work is being done with dummy text or fake content. This filler text might take the form of Lorem Ipsum or it might just say “text goes here” or something else.
Whatever words are chosen, they aren’t the real words, and for that reason it can be difficult to get a realistic feel for the design of the website while using dummy text. The same goes for images. A low resolution placeholder photograph or a gray rectangle can show you the layout of a website, but it’s not the same as seeing the website.
Some people say you should never use dummy text, because real content is too important to your design decisions. I believe this to a certain extent, but using dummy text is often necessary for practical reasons. Whether it’s a lack of resources or a situation that just can’t be changed, there are plenty of times when getting the real text and photos prior to starting visual design work just doesn’t happen.
Those who do need to use dummy text often find that when a design is being invented around all those unreal words and images, there might come a point where things just get stuck. This is often characterized by the designer making tweak after tweak while the client repeatedly responds with some variation of “Hmm, yeah, that’s still not quite right. Something is missing.”
Bingo. Something is definitely missing.
When things get stuck like this, it almost always means you’ve reached the point where you have to start bringing in real content. Otherwise it’s like trying to judge a movie with real actors but no real scenery and no real script.
The difference between a placeholder photograph and the real one can be huge. And when you bring in the real content, you might find the dimensions need to be a little different, or a lot different, or that certain messages demand to be placed differently than you envisioned before the words were real.
Anytime it’s possible to have all of your content up front, you should. If that’s not possible, just keep in mind that getting stuck in the placeholder phase doesn’t mean it’s time to quit or find a new web designer. It probably just means it’s time to get serious about your content so you and your designer can figure out what this website is really going to be. That’s when the real design happens anyway.
