Josiah discusses the the question that irritates webmasters everywhere and could be the key to your site's success.
Indeed society today demands everything be bigger, faster, brighter and just plain "spiffy". But what does a consumer want? Do they want clean, user friendly and fast.. or do they want to be wowed, amazed and astonished?
Well that depends on who your consumer is. Say perhaps Joe Blow is looking for a design consultant to design his restaurant. Now Joe goes to 3 different sites, the first one is your average text in a box, cheesy clip art and plain old colors. The second he visits is fast, clean, simple, well designed and gets straight to the point. The 3rd Joe visits is amazing, astonishing work.. once it loads, but some what obscured by the barrage of pixels and colors, joe couldn't find any plain info on the guy.
Now who do you think is most likely to be getting a call from Joe? The 1st, 2nd or 3rd site he visited?
Well if you guessed the second, give your self a cookie!
This is only a simple illustration on how design matters. If you are a web designer, then you would consider making your web page fast loading but at the same time pretty cool. If you were a writer or publisher you might consider tailoring your web site to showcase some of your writing skills or things you have published. Same with a software company or any company with a web site.. you don't want your potential clients to lose interest, yet at the same time not get lost for finding product info or prices.
Navigation through a site, especially a big one, is a problem that has many solutions, between the more popular left hand side menu to the top menu, to even a right hand menu. From the simple and ultra smooth Pusher.com to the complex Macromedia.com. The impression you want to make on a client is and should always be the number one factor in how you design. Here you`ll be able to find an amount of really great websites, which will help you understand what I was talking about: webdesign-showcase.
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