Those were the wise words of a famous Anchorman and it’s good advice for anyone who’s designing a web site. You have to separate yourself from your competitors and anyone else in your field. If your design says, “Look at me! or I know what I’m doing!” there’s a chance visitors to your site will want to dig deeper and see if you’re content backs up their initial thoughts. You could have the greatest content in the world and be an expert but if you can’t caputre your audience off the bat they won’t bother to stay and see.
Believe it or not a lot of companies overlook this seemingly obvious step. Some people and companies think they know what they’re doing by designing a “cool” design that uses all the latest technology available. But that’s wrong, well that’s not true either. I mean to say that it’s not always the right answer. You have to design for your audience; this incorporates having to take into account their browser, their age, knowledge of the web, their online tendencies and what designs/colors they’d like to see to name a few. You have to research your audience before you build your site, this is one of the reasons that most people (like Paul Boag) will tell you to focus on content first. Once you hone in on what kind of content you’ll have on your site you can better outline what your personas will be like which will then allow you to design a website specific to their needs and tendencies.
For my website I’m leaning towards very neutral colors and trying to keep my design very simple. I want to have it clutter-free with lots of space so that your eyes will focus on the content on the website. Since I will have images, audio, video and other kind of art on my site I want the user’s eye to be naturally drawn to it. My design will be very important because my users will be mostly artists or people interested in advertising. I want my site to have new and innovative features for users to use but I will not sacrifice usability for design. I also want to make my same site in Spanish and I’m still debating to have the design a little different for a different audience. Or I may just integrate the two sites so it will have Spanish and English articles. But making all of these decisions before you start building is important so you can let your content guide your design instead of allowing the design you built to limit your content.
Hi Angelo –
First I think you changed your theme here, looking nice, the red definitely pops. I think the image of the iceberg is a nice way to look at blog and site design in general. There is a lot of work people wont see.
Megan
Hey Angelo,
A group I am in is having the design versus content debate. One guy gets that you go to a website to use it, not appreciate as fine art and has been working with me on content. The other guy keeps saying that whats to do each step of the process one at a time and doesn’t want to talk about content until the design is done. It is getting kind of annoying.