When to let go of your website designing ideas
As hard as it may be, but letting go of your website designing ideas
and listening to the customer may actually be of benefit in the
long run.
I know what you are saying, you've been in the web designing business long enough to know
what works and wont doesn't, what would my customer know? Well after approaching web
design in the same manner, I've unfortunately had no other choice but to give in to
my best laid plans and comply with the wishes of my customers.
Construction of good websites usually means that it has to be appealing
to the eye, as well as being fully functioning for Search Engine
benefits, but ultimately it must display professionalism for the
business represented.
Complying with W3C Standards (W3C Markup Validation Service) for
both HTML and CSS validation is paramount to good design and programming
(but not necessary for good Google PR, I will discuss in later posts),
so when designing we like to use base HTML formatting and CSS text
font like Tahoma 11pt, to make neat easy to read text and nice page
image layouts.
I will list some cases of where letting go has benefits for both
parties involved and how in some circumstances actually resulted
in little or no web traffic for the website.
Case Study 1. Architectural Firm, flash and font matters.
Our customer wanted the use of Flash elements to display several
architecture images with a nice fade between images and changes
to original CCS Font used Tahoma 11pt font and replaced with Century
Gothic 11pt, which is used in all their logos and architecture design
work.
As most would know embedding Flash files into your website results
in W3C Validation undefined source failure, thus rendering the site
Invalid Markup. After explaining this, the customer felt the need
to have a nice graphical flash style image far outweighed the importance
of quality valid HTML Transitional Markup. To them the appearance
and perception of their website to their customers was far more
advantageous than complying with the W3C.
In addition they wanted the use of the Century Gothic font rather
than Tahoma. By design Century Gothic has a much larger font height
than Tahoma and when used increased the page height larger than
when using Tahoma thus resulting in the site displaying with scroll
bars when view under 1024 x 768 resolution, where previously it
fitted in the whole page perfectly.
In the end the customer achieved the desired affects they wanted
and ultimately it is the 'customer who always knows best'.
Case Study 2. Box supplier becomes boxed in.
Our customer had started a new business supplying cardboard boxes
for moving and packing. They wanted a simple site with heavy graphical
image elements and little or no text on the home page.
Explaining to the customer the role of text based search engines
results and that having no 'readable text' on the home page would
limit their visibility, they choose design over results.
Why you may ask would a company limit their possibilities of being
found on search engines? Well the question still burns with us too,
but as mentioned earlier the 'customer always knows best' and the
decision was solely theirs to make.
Their philosophy was simple, their website was purely to be used
as a reference guide and not the source of extra business, as their
marketing strategies would be enough to garner constant business.
To this day I still wonder why they limited their marketability
and in particular their website which is always online and can be
searched at all times of the day.
So in summary the best laid plans of mice and men (well in this
case web designers) can be a utter waste of good management as what
I have stated all along that the 'customer always knows best' and
ultimately they are the ones paying for your service so sometimes
its best to lay down your guns and concede defeat.
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