Any small business website designer will tell you that design is one of the most important parts of a website. And I would agree.
Actually, you’re okay with this too. If a site being built for your business doesn’t look right to you, you’ll tell your designer to go away and start over. You wouldn’t sign up for a poorly designed site for your own business, and you appreciate that your customer won’t either.
You have to have a nice design, then. But where do you find it?
Fashion drives website design.
Look at the fashion change happening right now in sites built for Web 2.0. Clean lines, solid colors, gradients, and large fonts are popular and going mainstream. Another change from previous fashion can be seen on corporate websites. A decade ago they had gray backgrounds and used burgundy colors – now you probably won’t see this combination on a corporate website. Just as design never stops offline, it never rests on websites.
Welcome to Fashion Web. Your site needs to be reasonably close to current fashion so that it stays current for your visitor. For this reason, evaluate your site every two years and maybe redesign it.
In addition, there is a technological consideration for the design.
Email box forms and Google Earth maps and satellite images are examples of this. New technologies in their day, these tools are now routinely incorporated into websites by designers.
You must use new technology on your site if it will help your customer and your site will work better for them.
The design of a site is driven by what visitors think looks good and what designers know is technically possible. Think of both when designing a website.
