What is Web Design in 2018?
We are going to take a break from process principles to talk about some specific disciplines. Even if you are building a physical product, you are probably going to need a website. And having a website will mean that you need to understand a few things about web design if you can expect to get your vision across and meet your customer’s needs.
I define web design as the process that a team or a single producer uses to create a website. Simple right? Except that a site will be delivered to the audience at any size, with many different resolutions and many different bandwidths. Everything is fluid. And the speed of the interaction and how the site is built will affect the user that is as important as the colors you choose.
If the site is built with bad code or buggy code it can slow down the performance of the site. And slow is bad. Very, very bad.
A web designer must be aware of that as well. Oh, and of course, you have no way of knowing WHO will be visiting your site. They may have a disability. So you need to be able to not only support hundreds of different screen sizes but various abilities as well.
Oh wait, you want to be able to change the content regularly? And you want people to be able to share this idea on Facebook or Twitter? Do you want to sell from your site as well? And signup for an email?
Web design is very very complicated. What was once a powerhouse discipline where a few talented individuals would manage a project and do all the work, almost everything is built in teams now. Your cousin might be talented, but asking her to build your entire site will be a tall order.
Increasingly, in my work, I don’t even do the visual design. What I would have built in Photoshop or Sketch I now work with others to do, and I work on building out the interactions and the “front-end” of the website.
I bring this up because I want you to have this in the back of your head when you start to think of doing a website for your product. Be aware that you should be working with a team of people, and that the team should be able to provide evidence of the work that they have done. Your idea of a team and the vendors may be dramatically different.
The creative industries use contractors all the time. So while an agency might have one maybe two full-time employees, they often serve as creative directors. Managing the project from a creative perspective and working with you while the team of contractors that they love to work with are executing in the background. I’ve even hired external project managers.
So, web design is a complicated mess. And it takes lot’s of talented people to pull it off. Your job in the process is to be able to communicate your goals clearly and evaluate if what you are being shown meets those goals. If they are, awesome! If not, you need to speak up. Web designers are not mind readers.
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This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
