Excellent Website Design - Why Seeking Great Is By no means Good Sufficient

The majority of internet site designers concentrate wrongly on designing web-sites that appeal to their consumers. This results in websites which can be poorly developed to serve the requires of the visitor or the client. Following years involved in web design and evaluating and optimizing web-sites, I not too long ago concluded that the vast majority of today's sites are no superior created now than they have been five years ago.

Yes, websites designed inside the past five years surely appear a lot improved and have more wow features like impressive effects, spectacular graphics and clever videos. But that does not imply as websites they execute any far better in satisfying the needs of your visitor or the site owner. In actual fact quite normally all these effects, graphics and flash videos while enhancing the visual appeal on the site truly make the site worse with regards to overall performance. By efficiency I imply how well the website satisfies the objectives it must happen to be developed to meet.

After you are trying to have a web page created or redesigned the first thing you will need to establish is what would be the objectives on the web-site?

What is the objective of your internet site?

Is definitely the objective to:

Stun visitors with a jaw dropping graphics and effects? Get superior critiques for the internet site from other website designers? Inform and educate guests? Attract the correct visitors enthusiastic about what the web page has to give? Sell items or solutions? Capture leads or subscribers? If you'd like proof of your extent to which web designers concentrate on the visual appeal of a website rather that being match to get a goal, you only must appear in the dozens of web sites that showcase what they look at to be great site styles.

These showcase web-sites for good website design feature 1,000's of internet sites submitted by net designers that get reviewed and voted for largely by their peers, or so it would appear. Examples are siteinspire.net, unmatchedstyle.com, csselite.com, beautiful2.com, webcreme.com, creattica.com, divinecss.com, foliofocus.com, cartfrenzy.com and bestwebgallery.com. Some, but not all of those showcase websites state what they regard as superior website design in their submission recommendations.

Unmatchedstyle.com are dedicated to acknowledging those that have produced exceptionally gorgeous web websites by employing internet standards and great usability practices.

Foliofocus.com is often a internet style gallery that exists to showcase the best collection of portfolio internet sites from web and graphic designers, photographers, and other experts.

Cartfrenzy.com is usually a style gallery for by far the most well-designed e-commerce and shopping sites.

Bestwebgallery.com capabilities a wide selection of excellent design and style web-sites (Flash & CSS). They go on to declare what quality style means to them, which is: Quality Design and style = Visual + Technical + Creativity Note here the emphasis is around the visual appearance, technical wiz bangs and the creative merit.

Based on my own experience auditing and evaluating internet websites and those featured on showcase web sites like the ones above, is why I have concluded that net designers concentrate too much on creating fantastic looking web sites that appeal to their peers.

Case Study

As if to prove the point I carried out a detailed case study of a highly rated internet site featured on unmatchedstyle.com. In choosing the internet site for this case study I was also seeking for the site of a net style firm since that should really represent all that's most effective in good web style. The site received a 9.1 out of 10 rating for great design and style from the showcase site and a video review.

Following my detailed case study evaluation with the website I determined the internet design and style high-quality rating of the home page to become 3.9 out of 10 and the site as a whole was rated 4.2 out of 10. Of course, I used different criteria for my ratings for superior high quality net design and style than did the showcase web-site that gave a rating of 9.1.

For the home page I used a checklist that evaluated 12 categories of design, with 135 elements of page design and style and for the whole internet site I used a checklist that evaluated 91 aspects of site design.

Any on the 226 aspects of net design that have been not found to become present had been also given a severity rating. This severity rating was based on the level of impact the missing aspect had on the style and on the frequency with which it occurred.

The number of aspects on which the net page or internet site passed combined with the level of severity was used in a formula to determine a rating of great high-quality net style.

What was clear from this case study is definitely the site used inside the study received a high 9.1 rating for excellent style from the showcase site based on a quite different assessment criteria to my own, that gave the site a rating of only 4.2.

So, the question is, which rating for great website design is the suitable one, a showcase site rating of 9.1 or my rating of 4.2?

Properly, that depends on whether you would like to base a rating for superior web design largely on searching great, or on a detailed assessment of 226 aspects of good web design and style I expect to find in a nicely created internet site.

Deciding on what is a excellent web page design also depends on whether you'd like a web site that looks very good or one that's designed for a goal and to satisfy some clearly defined objectives. If you want a site that does more than just appear good then you need to look a bit far more closely at the design and style of your site, because just looking great is in no way great adequate, at least not for me.