Professional Website Design: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
It seems like an eternity ago that I first added website design to my repertoire. For 14 years I’ve designed and developed hundreds of websites. All shapes and sizes and quite the assortment of content management systems. Custom themes, galleries, e-commerce stores for products and for service-based businesses. Sites to view, buy, support, organize, perform and to educate.
We’ve gone from clients not wanting to know anything about anything, to clients wanting to manage it all themselves, back to many not wanting to. After all, who has the time!
If I’m going to manage the sites for them, it doesn’t matter if it’s html or a WordPress or Concrete5 CMS site. However, when I design those WordPress and Concrete5 sites and hand them over to clients to manage, this is when it can turn out really good or turn bad or ugly.
Many take the time to learn how their site’s CMS work, yeah! For others, I’m not sure if it’s because they don’t take the time, even when many of us create tutorials like my 10 video tutorial series on WordPress. Sometimes they just insert things where they don’t belong, add graphics or text in colors that clearly do not match their branding (like a photo in a shocking, clashing color) or adding a video that’s to large and doesn’t fit.
I’ve seen so many things go wrong and needed to write this post because I want all those clients who feel they are not web-savvy out there to realize it does make a big difference what you do.
What’s a brand visibility designer to do? Explain!
My mission is to give clients exceptional professionalism and hope they consider this before they go and do some of the things that can ruin a great site. Their visitors clearly will notice and their site was created to welcome and entice those visitors.
Your professionalism counts in bringing back to you the caliber of client you wish for. When you lower your standards and show you don’t care as you should, slapping things this way and that without thinking it through, it will come back to you in the clients you attract.
If you plan on populating the pages and content on your site, adding plugins and expanding your site, yourself… respect the art of professional web design. The Good, the Bad and YES, especially the Ugly is a reflection of you and your business.
