Professional Look

As a website designer, I am extremely fussy about how a website looks, feels and behaves. In my eight years of experience, I have found a number of common flaws that affect the professionalism of a website (including the professional level of the design itself and the level of professional experience behind the designer) and scare off potential return visitors.

1. Visitor Attention Span: Web surfers have a very short attention span. Reading the newspaper or a book is one thing but staring at a computer monitor is another. It strains the eyes, causes shoulder and back discomfort and too many colours, graphics, photos, animations and options can quickly overload a visitors brain.

What you end up with is a visitor who will click away from you website in about 20-30 seconds and move on to something else or worse, to seek out your competition. Will they return later? Probably not. And word of mouth advertising just went out the window with that click.

2. Immediate Impressions: As you've probably read elsewhere on my site, you have to make that positive first impression as soon as a visitor lands on your website. They have to immediately see that things are well organized and coherently put together.

Your visitors are there for a purpose: to find something that your site offers. And they want to be able to find it quickly, without wading through endless pages of seemingly pointless content or staring, bewildered, at flashy graphics and endless animations and links to everything under the sun. Navigation links must be clear and concise, telling the visitor exactly where that link is going to take them to. And once they get there, they have to be able to get back without getting lost.

3. Who Is The Website For? When most web designers go about creating a design they have one thing in mind: to impress you. They will use flash animations, graphics for borders on everything, enormous banners and "click here" "click there" links all over the pages. But in the end, you have to look at your site carefully and look at it from the perspective of a visitor who might become a potential lead or customer. A site that looks good to you might not necessarily be attractive to your visitors. Your web designer must be able to research and get to know your product/s and/or services, your Internet competition and most importantly your target audience so that the site can be geared to please and attract the type of visitors that you are seeking.

Remember, your website is for your target audience and not for you (although you do have to like it and it does have to properly reflect you or your business :). With this in mind you'll be in a much better position to select an appropriate, knowledgeable website designer.

4. John or Jane and Their Website Maker Program: This scenario typically turns into a disaster as John or Jane try to whip up a website using one of the available web site programs that do the work for you. Generally, John or Jane have no experience whatsoever in website design nor any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes elements that go into a website to help make a website "happen". Their boss figures, "Well, I suppose that's our website", not knowing any better either, and up it goes onto the Internet where everybody can see it. These web page programs are fine and useful tools, many designers use them. But put in the hands of a novice will not get you a professional website.

Although these cases sometimes turn out fine, they often do a number of negative and damaging things to you or your business' image once the site goes live. First to be destroyed is your image and branding efforts. No matter who you are or what company the website represents we read books by their cover: we're human and often judge by what we see. Next is that someone just got paid to design a poor, second-rate product that can't be found on the search engines and that most people will quickly click away from because of poor quality images, improper font use, poor colour choices, poorly organized content, little or no functionality and a complete lack of that professional appearance.

While keeping the development of your website within your own company ranks might save you a few bucks, out sourcing your web development to the right designer will provide a far better prospect of getting you a return on your investment and putting your best face on the Internet.

The bottom line here is that websites really need the attention of someone who not only has a good eye for design and layout, but also an in-depth knowledge of how the Internet works and how websites interact with it.

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