We are all aware of the sayings “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” “Different strokes for different folks” and “There is no accounting for taste.” Unfortunately, although these sayings are universal, the associated insights don’t seem to be. This is nowhere more apparent when designing something for someone else. What looks “professional” to one person, can easily be boring, ugly, or even unprofessional to a different person.

As a web designer you learn that almost all descriptive terms are useless in completing the nuts-and-bolts task of creating a design the pleases the client. You need them to show you what they like, and you need to show them how you interpret that, and there the actual dialog begins.

Over and above pleasing the client, the designer’s task is to make the client realize that their taste is not universal, and their target audience may not respond positively to what they think looks good, or cool, or whatever. More important than pleasing themselves  (or their partners, employees, spouse,  friends or mother) is creating a design that communicates the desired message to the target audience.

What can be even more of a challenge is the tendency for inexperienced website buyers to be fixated on look-and-feel, or the visual design, to the neglect and expense of useability. The desire to speed through, or skip the boring task of information design and content creation to get to the visual mockups is extremely common and uniformly disastrous. Then, when the website flops, of course it is the visual design that is the problem and needs to be fixed.

As a web designer, the best thing you can do to save the client from themselves in such cases is to try to explain with examples, and if that doesn’t work, stick to your process regardless of the pressure to do otherwise.

I designed this website for a criminal defense attorney.

This custom WordPress Theme was designed for a Wedding Photographer’s portfolio blog.

This website was design primarily as a sales tool that features shipping software video tutorials. The website is available in English and Spanish versions.

The Flash video features a custom player with full screen capability, as well as custom overlays that display calls to action when the video is paused, and when it completes.

This project was a website redesign for a non-profit organization that works children, parents and teachers to promote a character-building methodology. The key function of the website is to provide educational document downloads. The site also includes an events calendar, an online shop and photo galleries of the organizations numerous events.

This website was created for a non-profit organization dedicated to feeding the hungry. Key components of the website are a custom interactive map feature, the ability to publish news articles to multiple categories and the ability to accept donations.

Google announced on Tuesday that it would be removing keyword query data from Google referrals for searches performed by users logged into their Google account. The reason given by Google was to protect user privacy. “ Protecting user privacy is important to us” states Amy Chang or the Google Analytics team, on the Google Analytics blog post announcing the change.

However, Google is NOT protecting the privacy of those logged in searchers who click on a Google Adwords paid ad. Their keyword data will still be transmitted to paid advertisers’ Google Analytics accounts. Aaron Wall wrote a great post on the hypocrisy of Google’s ham-handed PR.

The bottom line is that businesses will no longer be able to see all keywords that are bringing visitors to their website. The amount of data effected, I assume, will depend on what percentage of Google searches are done by logged in users, and I didn’t have a good feel for that number initially (according to Matt Cuts it will be in the single digits).

I took a look at the stats for this website (http://www.pleasantonwebdesignblog.com/) and saw a new search term named “(not provided).”

So for the three full days for which I have keyword data that is marked  (not provided), slightly less than 4% of my total keyword data was  effected.  Not a big deal to me. So while there is potential for Google Analytics to lose it’s value over this issue, I’m not seeing it right now.

Today I’ve put together a particularly horrifying web design process. Please don’t actually follow these steps  (if you can help it).

1. Start the project by creating some visual mockups. Don’t worry about the content yet. You can just plug that in later when the website is completed.
2. Adjust the mockups based on each and every criticism made by the person responsible for the approval. This is especially important if the person requesting the changes has no design training.
3. Once the mockups are approved, build the website. Make sure to use dynamic drop-down  menus, or create the whole website in Flash.
4. Start writing the content. Someone in the company can steal text from competitors’ sites, or scribble some notes and hand them off to the designer to fix up. This is also the perfect time to brainstorm and come up with new sections, pages, features and functions to add to the website.
5. Find some pictures to put on the website. There must be some laying around somewhere, so dig them up. The designer will be able to clean them up in Photoshop if they aren’t that good. There are also may cheap stock photography websites out there that have some good pictures.
6. Plug the content into the website. Whoops! It doesn’t exactly fit. Rather than going back and redesigning the site from scratch, recode each of the pages to make it fit. If there are pages or sections you failed to include in the navigation just add the links somewhere and make them flash or blink to get the visitor’s attention.

The website is finished! It doesn’t look very good and isn’t user-friendly, but it’s a website!

Have any additional steps to add? Let me know.

Website redesign for GPS Fleet Services Company

I created this website for a restaurant in Danville. They have now expanded to a fourth restaurant, so you know the food is good. I’ve been there and can attest to the great food, great service and great atmosphere. And if you’ve never been to downtown Danville… Well, downtown Pleasanton definitely has some competition.