Would you ever make a huge investment in something and not do your research? I thought not! But somehow it seems people are more than willing to spend serious money on a web site and not ensure that it is fully optimised for its aims. I suppose the reality is that people use the web every day, they have experience of it, and they think that they ‘know it’. Far from this is the truth that so much of the underbelly of the web and websites in general is not known at all.
Building a web site is more than simply coding XHTML/CSS, it is about planning, design, marketing, building and deploying material to an online space. Just because an individual can program markup language doesn’t make them a good designer, and a good designer doesn’t necessarily make a good marketeer and copy writer, and such a copy writer doesn’t necessarily make a good user experience designer. Sure you can find a multi-faceted web ‘guru’ but that doesn’t mean that the site needs any less planning, discussion and research in terms of target audience, user experience and journey’s throughout the site.
And in that very same way, every step of the way through building a site, optimisations need to be made. You have to ask yourself: are you really squeezing every last drop out of the element being worked on? Question yourself all the time on a project:
- Does this layout really present the information in a clear, concise and direct manner?
- Can users find what they need quickly and easily within this format?
- Does the design accentuate the right elements?
- Does the design put across the right image for the aims of the site?
- Do we have the right copy and is the design optimised for it?
- Is the site build in as lean a manner as possible? Is it streamlined to the max?
- What experience do my users have in accessing the site? How can we improve it?
And at the heart of such questions you need to be putting your target audience and key site visitors, because they ultimately the ones using the site and the ones you are trying to convert by making a product sale or turning into an evangelist for your cause. Remember, you are the client of the web design team, but ultimately site users are your ‘clients’ and you need to do what is best for them by understanding their needs and requirements and helping them to fulfill those needs in as quick and easy a fashion as possible.
I realise we live in the real world and everyone is in a time crunch, but time, energy and effort spent now pays dividends later. Of course no amount of planning and preparation can take care of every single eventuality, but at least you can do your best, and once the site is live and analytics data coming in you can better profile your visitors and move on from there by asking new questions and putting those users at the centre of the questions again. They are of course a key stakeholder in your business and site, as customers, and putting them at the centre of it is the most sensible thing to do.
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I am, for want of a better word, a web developer. Practising since '96 and
focused on front and back-end work with a slant for optimisation.
I love music, art, and helping people, traits which I hope are borne out here.
Read more about me and this blog on the 
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