I'm a graphic designer. Graphic. Not Web. For many companies and individuals looking to hire a freelancer or in-house person, the two jobs become interchangeable. Let me start by saying they are not. Graphic designers tend to be more classically trained in print mediums. Along with our required Adobe courses, we may take illustration classes or painting--and always a font class. Why? Because we start school with the knowledge that most of what we do will end up in a brochure, on a billboard, or some other type of paper. At best we get only one, extremely brief, introduction to web. Web designers have a very different set of problems to face when they sit down to create. They have to worry about accessibility, cross-browser compatibility, usability and any number of other things. Some graphic designers also have training in web design and vice versa, but its rare to find a person who is equally strong in both areas. Armed with all this knowledge, you'd think that I would have re-examined my approach to this project. You'd be wrong.
Once my client made it clear that I would be the one handling the site re-design, I was excited. Thinking about "how cool" I could make it look over took my entire thought process. I spent hours online daily looking at web design examples from all over the design community. Issue 1: I planned form before function. When designing for print, clients usually know what they want--say a brochure--and may know roughly what they want it to say. Neither the client or the designer has to think about "how will the recipient use this?" because print brochures only have one level of interactivity. You either read it or you don't. Web sites are a different matter. Lesson 1: You have to plan out how your site will work--the navigation, the content, page hierarchy, ect.--before you work on hardcore aesthetics.
After realizing my mistake, I tossed out all the work I'd done so far and started sketching. And sketching. And sketching. Until I came up with a simple, easy to navigate site. Time to start coding. I knew that I didn't want to build too much of the site in Photoshop and that I didn't want heavy Flash either because those take a long time to update and freshness of content is paramount. So what options were there for me? CSS. This markup language would allow me to create an attractive, dynamic easily up-datable site with just one simple page of text. Great! But I didn't know the first thing about typing it up so I Googled it, and got lots and lots of templates and example code. Issue 2: Websites should be treated as individuals. Issue 3: Frankenstein's Monster was a bad idea for a reason. There are a lot of places out there that sell canned websites. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against them--and on occasion have encouraged clients to purchase one as quick means to an end--but they should never be one-size-fits-all. I tried starting with a template so I could adapt it to my needs. I adapted and tweaked and changed until it was nothing like the template I started with. Lesson 2: If you find yourself looking at templates thinking "I'll leave that off" or "I can change that and that one too" then you're better off starting from scratch. Lesson 3: Never copy a bunch of template parts and paste them together. You won't get a cohesive site.
After throwing everything out and starting yet again, I finally felt like I was well on my way to a great site.That was around a week ago. The site it still in its beginning stages and I've been working on it a few hours every day. Each day I make progress and end up deleting most of it and keeping only one change after hours of work. This may sound like it should be the 4th issue, but its really not. Its Lesson 4: Never be afraid to sacrifice your progress for good work. Granted, time may not always allow you to practically start over every day or to move at a snail's pace, but pushing through sub-par work just because you dread the thought of starting over is unacceptable.
So why does web design take so long? Its because good web designers:
- Take the time to plan for functionality
- Craft individual website solutions
- Start from scratch building a unique site
- Test and test and test everything to make sure the user experience is the best possible
- Start over when they have to
