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Avoiding Evil Web Design

One reason that there are so many awful business web sites out there is bad choice in web designers. The principles of avoiding design evil are pretty simple, though.

1. Take control of the web site design process yourself. You understand your business and your customers better than any designer. Have clear objectives for your site, then make sure that every design choice helps you achieve them.
2. Avoid designers who are likely to design a web site that they like but your customers and prospects hate.
3. Follow some simple guidelines for choosing the right web designer.

Avoiding Designers Who Do Bad Things

Avoid any designer who wants to design your web pages before helping you design the site. Equally avoid designers who want to dump your brochure online, suggest you use video for a 10 minute speech, or who don't seem to care about the business processes your site supports.

Run very fast in the opposite direction from any designer who uses the terms "killer" or "cool" to describe web sites he or she thinks are good. No client of mine has ever asked me for a "cool" strategy, so I don't see why they would want a "cool" web site to support that strategy.

Be equally leery of folks who've won design awards. Most of them are given for stunning graphic or technological design. The web is more like the telephone (a simple tool for getting information quickly) than it is like television. Designers who suffer from "TV Envy" are dangerous to you.

Pretend that designers who only show you your site on storyboards or other static displays have a 100% fatal communicable disease that you can catch by listening to them. React the same way if your designer only shows you your site as an outline instead of a diagram.

Guidelines for Making Good Designer Choices

Here are some guidelines for picking a professional designer for your web pages.

1. Design the site first, then design the pages. Many designers can do pages but don't know much about designing sites.
2. Get references. Ask the references about how the designer was to work with. Were things done on time? Did the designer meet the budget targets? Did the designer care about business objectives? Was the designer easy to work with?
3. Ask your designer to identify six excellent business sites. This will tell you if they know what a good site is. The sites they pick should be fast loading, full of information, and easy to navigate.
4. Most of the time you'll use text and artwork that you already have. So make sure your designer can do the things you want from them -- clean code, scripts (so you can do interactive things) and programming.
5. Make sure your designer is willing to give you three or four basic templates -- basic page designs that you can add content to later. Once your site is up, you don’t want to be paying designer rates to simply put new information on your pages. Also, working with basic page designs gives your site a common, unifying look.
6. You should be doing your own routine updates routinely. It's easy, especially with new design software. Make sure your designer knows this. You should not be paying designer rates to do routine updates.

Evil design makes nasty web sites and there’s lots of it out there. The good news is that it’s easy to avoid if you take control, watch out for danger signs, and apply simple principles for choosing good designer.

Created/Revised/Reviewed: 12/31/00

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