It’s important to gather opinions from different people during the design process (provided they understand or are a part of your target audience) but this is where it ends. Opinions should not equal decisions. Design by committee never works… ever. There needs to be one person that ultimately makes the final decisions. When you have a large group of people making decisions on design and functionality nothing gets done and the final result is a mix of contrasting tastes and personal preferences…

1. Designer: Hi John have you and your team decided on the layout changes?
2. John: Yes we have decided to move the nav bar to the right, add a third column and scrap the main image. Thanks!
3. Designer: Ok. I have made the requested changes, new file attached.
4. John: Mark has just come back from down South. He made some good points, we have decided to go back to having the image but he thinks we should use the attached photo instead, he has a good eye for detail. Also can we increase the font size, the older members of our team are having trouble reading the text.
5. Designer: Increasing the font size isn’t necessary as the website is aimed at teenagers who generally have much keener eye site. I strongly recommend leaving it as is.
6. John: Hmmm, these guys are very insistent about the font size, please enlarge. Oh and can you try this image instead so we can compare the two, Ellen thinks the current one has too much purple in it. Oh and we want to find something to fill in the white space in the middle.
7. Designer: Ok. John I have enlarged the font and once again changed the image. Can I ask your reason for wanting to fill the white space? White space is an important part of the design, if we fill in this space just for the sake of it the layout will feel very squashed and cluttered.
8. John: Thanks the new photo looks great but I feel like we need something else. If we put another graphic where the white space is then we solve both problems… I have attached a graphic of a unicorn Marks daughter drew on her computer, she is very talented!
9. Designer: Oh dear…

This is not far off some actual conversations I have had with clients. It is no ones fault. If anything it is the designers responsibility to inform the client on how the process should work but in reality this advice is often ignored. If the client in the above scenario had taken the opinions of his peers on board and filtered them out depending on the relevance to the target audience then this would have been a much smoother project. Try to please everyone and you will please no one. Is that how it goes? I think you get the point.

Why do you need to know my budget? You just want to know how much money you can squeeze out of me!

I can completely understand how this may sound like a suspect question… why can’t you just give me a quote? When a client asks me for a quote I give them one without asking their budget, at least initially, but many designers and developers do ask right off the bat and there is good reason for this.

If you don’t want to spend very much money you will get a very basic website, plain and simple. If you want to spend more then you can take advantage of your designers experience and taylor your project to meet your needs as tightly as possible. There is no “one size fits all” design template, although that sounds wonderful. As there is no magical template, if we know your budget, then we can taylor your project to target your audience as best as your budget allows. The most obvious deciding factor I can think of when it comes to target audience is age, but of course there are many others. What part of the world will this project be primarily seen? What gender are you leaning towards? Are you aiming at outdoorsy types, the retired, students, home owners? The list goes on and is of course dependent on what your business actually does. All of this is pretty common knowledge, but is often forgotten by both designers and their clients, usually to make room for their own personal taste which is a big mistake.

A bigger budget means more thought put into both the design / aesthetics of your website and the functionality. Have you ever visited a website and ended up staying, looking around for an extra five or ten minutes just because it “felt” nice to browse. Little details go a long way. Even something as simple as tooltips that pop up to provide extra information are incredibly helpful to your visitors. Also creative error pages that display when your visitor accidentally ends up at a broken link help to make everything feel a bit less formal. Obviously these are only two quick examples but the list could go for quite some time…

A “tooltip” that appears to give information when you rest your mouse on a certain word or icon.

A “404 error page” from “Mail Chimp”.

So to put it basically, bigger budget equals more time. More time equals better results. I have not even touched on the area of creating a second version of your site to work better on devices such as the iPhone. I am not saying that you do have to create a separate website for it to work on these devices, but if it is in your budget then it is highly recommended as it is obviously a completely different canvas. It’s a different size, a different shape, it functions differently in many ways. iPhone users get sick of zooming in and out over and over again just to look through a traditional website. If you have a site designed specifically for this canvas then it is a much more enjoyable experience for your visitors and the value of that enjoyment is substantial.

iPhone version of the Mail Chimp website. It has been designed specifically for the iPhone as opposed to using their standard website.

My mate says he can build me a 10 page website for £100, why should I pay you so much more?

I think every designer or developer has heard something like this at some point in their career and it truly makes me cringe whenever I hear of it. Let me take a breath and calm down before I continue.

Firstly, if you truly believe that someone you know can do this with a result that you will find satisfactory then why are you still approaching me for this project? If your mate is great at maths would you hire him to keep your books up to date? These days almost everyone has access to a computer and some version of website building software. It is easy for people to start thinking they know what they are doing without any kind of training or experience. Alas, this is sadly not the case.

It’s frightening the amount of times I have taken over jobs from unexperienced designers or developers and opened up their files only to realise that starting from scratch is unavoidable. Even more frightening is the fact that people are hiring them. You really do get what you pay for, professional designers and developers don’t just mark up their prices for the hell of it. This industry changes fast and frequently. Hire someone that knows what they are doing.

A great article on the “my mate can build it cheap” syndrome.

I’m in a hurry, just do what you think is best

You may have a tight deadline. That’s fine. But this should never trump the need to prepare for a project properly. The smoothest projects I have worked on are the ones where a lot of discussion took place before any first steps were taken. It may seem like you are wasting time fluffing about with trivial details but I cannot stress enough how important preparation is. You will always save time in the long run if you first invest some time talking things out thoroughly with whoever is tackling your project.

Ask as many questions as you can… about anything you feel is relevant. And be prepared to answer any questions your designer throws at you. Some clients, when asked their reasons for wanting a website, actually can’t give me an answer. They just think they should have one because everyone else does. As designers if we have no tangible goals to work towards the project can turn into a never ending pursuit of an unlikely conclusion and no one walks away happy.

Ok. Rant over. Hopefully this has helped to answer a few questions.

Main Brief Points:

• Create a new logo
• Design a new, easily navigable layout
• Keep existing Google rank as best as possible
• Recreate all existing wedding location reviews to his “wedding location critique” section in a new more professional format
• Allow my client to easily add/edit new wedding location reviews to his “wedding location critique” section
• Allow my client to easily add/edit items in his portfolio
• Automatically display portfolio and wedding location galleries in a professional gallery system with fast loading times
• Create a blog for any news and updates
• Make my clients customer testimonials more prominent
• Keep all static content editable by my client

The original style of Paul’s website did not do his work justice. After looking through his extensive amount of high quality shots I sat down and began to sketch up a project brief.

First things first, how will it work?

Paul’s original website featured a portfolio like any photography website but an interesting feature was a page dedicated to each photo shoot location. These “location pages” had info on the location, indoor and outdoor ratings in regards to the quality of photography that the location allowed and of course photos… the problem though was that all of these photos were just plonked on the page which meant scrolling down to see each one individually which was a huge problem seeing as some location pages had around 30 photos.

The solution to this was to create a nice, clean image slider for each location page and of course for the main portfolio page where Paul showcased his best shots. The location information was now placed next to the image slider allowing both the vital information and the photography to be seen above the fold so to speak.

Each location page was built in a way that made it incredibly easy for Paul to add his images to these location pages. After creating a new location, the images are simply uploaded all at once with one click and then the website does the rest… all photos are then re-sized and automatically placed in a sliding gallery on the corresponding page… even the alt tags and image titles are entered automatically for Search Engine Optimization purposes.

As per the initial project requirements I kept everything as simple as possible making the website as easy as possible to navigate. Customer testimonials would be displayed one at a time in random order on the home page and a selection of Pauls favorite photos would now now fade in and out on the home page so that his work would be the first thing people see when visiting.

The design of the header, footer and background of the website were kept very minimal. The background is plain white except for a nice, large and bold watermark of Paul’s new logo which I also designed at the start of the project.

A blog was created so that Paul could write his own case studies and share any news or info with his target audience.

So all in all my client walked away with a complete package. His work is very easily added, it is very easily viewable by anyone visiting and now he has a site that does his work justice. As my client was very organized and knew exactly what he wanted, the project was completed in a very quick seven days from the design sign off.

If you are interested in a website such as this feel free to drop me a line here.

View the finished website here.