Saturday, July 14, 2007

finding a great website design

I like to think that the thing I do best as a designer is ‘read’ my clients, you know, give them exactly what they want. When I am working on a design, I will usually keep every bit of information that I’ve collected about the client in my mind… from my first interaction with them to every email, every conversation, and every remark about other designs.

My design process is not a complicated one and I believe that my clients appreciate the simplicity of it. My clients generally have an idea of what they want their website to look like… not in the same way that a design-oriented person would know… but in sort of an obscure, abstract way.

I have learnt that directly asking a client what they want often leaves me without clear direction, and it’s because a client knows what they want to ‘gain’ from having a website and what they want they visitors to ‘experience’ while on their website, and they ‘expect’ that their web designer is going to know how to put it together.

Every designer has her own method… mine consists of just one initial draft. A long time ago, I did about 3 initial drafts and made my client choose one on which to base the design, but I found that clients were often confused because they liked certain elements of each design, but were not sure how to articulate to me what those elements were. Now, I send just one initial design because usually people are able to easily tell you what they don’t want! I really believe that it’s simpler to describe what we do and don’t like when we have an example to work from, rather than trying to explain a concept without the aid of visuals.

Case Study: AlTruth

Initially my client told me that she really wanted orange, and 2 right sidebars. Even though I was not thrilled with this draft, as it was too simple and almost generic, I sent it out to get a feel for the client. As I said earlier, if they don’t like it, I find that I can learn more about what they really want from their reaction. Having said that, you should know that this is not always the case, many times I do get a good feel for what a client wants right from the start and often the first draft I do is accepted and becomes the base design for the final layout of the website.

By sending the first draft, I uncovered a lot of key factors about the look my client wanted, for example, she really liked brown, she preferred a ‘grunge’ look, she wanted something artistic. This was the second layout I sent to her, which she totally loved and which became the design that was used for the website.