The Difference between Okay and Great in Web Design
I’m putting APPEARANCE aside for this discussion. It’s assumed everyone wants a site that looks good. But there are a LOT of other considerations when you, as a consumer looking for a web designer, pick the person or team who is going to design your web presence.
The web is a fluid medium. Screen size, font size, even color can vary from computer to computer and from operating system to operating system. And all of those things can be affected by the choices the viewer makes in their browser preferences. How your site adjusts to those changes is key in maximizing the number of people who will view your whole site comfortably. Add into this mix that folks aren’t just using computers to view the web anymore and it becomes really important to choose the web crafter who knows how to handle the updates in the coding standards that will make viewing your pages in these alternative devices possible.
Picking someone who has always designed for print and thinks in pixel perfection and tabled design is not only not taking advantage of this, but this type of designer could be hurting you by ensuring with that pixel perfection that viewers who need to adjust font size due to vision issues can’t do so, or, worse, your pages look like something that cat dragged in when the font size is increased. So before you decide on a web designer try resizing the font in your web browser and see how the pages in their portfolio act when clicked up three sizes in Firefox, or set at ‘largest’ in IE. If the designs can’t stand up to font resizing that designer is eliminating a percentage of the audience that could be buying your goods or service.
Viewers access the web in a variety of ways, and on a variety of screen sizes, from the tiniest cellphone screen on up to the largest LCD at huge resolutions. In order to accomodate this variation sites should be designed to conform to the xhtml 1.0 transitional/strict and css web standards. Sites should also use xhtml and css for the layout instead of html table code. This ensures that your site should be at the very least usable in a large variety of screen sizes and on many devices such as screen readers for the blind, palm pilots, cellphones and devices that haven’t even been dreamed up yet. How do you, as a consumer, know if that’s so, if you don’t even know what code looks like? There’s a very easy way. Copy the url of one of your potential designer’s portfolio sites into the validation tool here:
The W3C Markup Validation Service
If the code validates you then need to do two things. The first is to look at which specification the code is validating against, which it will tell you on the results page in the large text in the green bar, ie “This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!” If it’s xhtml 1.0 either strict or transitional then you can scroll down to where it says, “If you use CSS in your document, you should also check it for validity using the W3C CSS Validation Service.” and click the link for the CSS Validation Service. If the css validates then this designer knows how to write clean, up to date code. Now you have one more test to do on this portfolio site. Resize your browser window smaller. If you’re on Windows, you can click the double box next to the X in the upper right corner. Drag the width even smaller and see what happens. If the design doesn’t degrade well when resized, in other words if all text that the viewer should be able to read isn’t displayed by scrolling, even if in somewhat altered form, then this web designer is excluding a portion of your potential customer base. If the designer can’t write validating code, or writes to a woefully outdated specification, then you are for sure not getting your money’s worth.
Another tool you can use in evaluating the work of any web designer is the Wickline Colorblind Web Filter which will show you how sites appear to people who suffer from the different types of color blindness, a significant portion of your audience. If the designer in question is not using this tool when determining link colors and other visual cues OR not using alternatives to those color cues, such as underlining or boldtext, this designer is not allowing a significant portion of your web visitors to access all parts of a website.
Now, I know most of you remember dialup . . . maybe some of you still use it to get online. Preview those same portfolio sites from a dialup connection and you will know what approximately 45% of your US visitors see (or don’t see) when they visit the website in question. Slow load? Ridiculously slow load? The person who has to wait too long to see the site doesn’t stick around, they’re on to the next. Do you want to eliminate that many potential viewers before they ever get to see your site?
There’s one more area, probably the toughest to evaluate. Is the site Search Engine friendly? This might be hard to evaluate on portfolio sites since it takes awhile for the search engines to index and properly rank a site and start returning the site in the search engine results. There are some things you can look at. Are the urls Search Engine Friendly? How you tell that is by looking at the location bar in your browser after you’ve drilled into the inner pages of any site. If the url is full of & and ? and &id= and other gobbledegook that only a computer can read, then it’s most likely not a search engine friendly url. If, however, the url is readable by a human, then it’s a search engine friendly url. Now, when the page loaded, did you notice any flash animations loading? If so, were they the only navigation buttons that exist on the page? According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, the first bullet under the technical section, that could kill a site in Google. In fact, those guidelines are a pretty good yardstick against which to measure the portfolio sites of any designer.
Any one of these problems or issues can cost you hugely down the road, over and over again, in lost sales or in lost visitors who might benefit from your website. So before you go with the cheapest bid you should figure out what your return on investment might be, ahead of time, by possibly paying a bit more to the code wrangler who builds properly functioning and easily navigated websites from the beginning, whose code is clean and up to date, whose websites don’t exclude those with vision or other handicap issues, and whose websites stand up to screen resizing, window resizing and font resizing. In other words, a KICKASS website . . .
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