Web design and your worst client

I always close deals with these: a slight hint of accent and charisma, an amalgamation of business metaphors and a languid monotone; in an attempt to deliver a half-assed performance and partial display of scholarship. In fact, I never imagined that dealing with different people would be as easy as this.

My main task is to bring people to our company.

Months before I took on this temp job as an interviewer, a temporary HR guy for a family business, I kept myself busy by spending a great deal of time on the Web, reading How to Interview People and HR-related books. I was originally invited to work for our company as a website designer; then somehow I was pushed into a vacant HR position for a reason I couldn’t understand.

In short, I spent my days in our office contacting people, urging them to get our service, and occasionally inviting them to a meeting to work out things like rates, contracts, and all that technical stuff.

Dealing with other people’s concerns wasn’t really my forte. I did manage it though, like learning a basic console game designed for a kindergarten kid. I found that pleasing, encouraging, and closing deals with customers was only half the fun.

Three months later, my sister, our COO, finally allowed me to join our web design team. As a newbie, she asked me to redesign our company’s boring website instead of doing the team’s main task, which was designing for clients. She said that customers and competitors had criticized our company’s website (and that it affected our sales and even our online reputation) and that our company’s top priority was to redesign the website.

Satisfy your customers vs. yourself

Dealing with customers is somehow different from just dealing with yourself. They have their fair share of pros and cons and it would take time to list them all here. However, the most important element that radically separates these two is pressure. Yes, pressure, which I defined as the sum of the demands of all the clients: schedule, exact date, fees, personal taste, etc.

Having a deadline and a quota is having a goal, and having a goal requires serious stuff like planning, daily goal setting, and all those essential things.

Unfortunately, the things I once had when dealing with clients were lost when I began to ponder our own company’s website. Designing for “yourself” was completely different, and it was difficult for me to work without the pressure that pushed me and forced me to work. Even though this redesign project was our company’s and not mine or my own, I still felt that the lack of pressure allowed me to do nothing at all. Also, the fact that I knew my sister (with her busy schedule) of hers would not butt in, or make appearances at my desk to check on my homework progress on a regular basis, only made me procrastinate even more. There were no deadlines or daily goals to meet, and there was no reason for me to worry about not accomplishing anything. The pressure is off, and I’ve just spent my time at a nearby convenience store, obsessing over fries doing nothing.

Yet these two things are the same

On the other hand, I also found that blaming a lack of pressure on my apathy was just a lame excuse for not doing my job effectively. These two things were still a matter of designing and there was no valid reason to blame the lack of pressure or whatever.

Knowing your niche and target market

I always reiterate and point this out to our incoming customers. We always say that we need to know your niche and industry so that we can identify the basic colors, fonts and layouts, and even the right domain names needed for your websites. Most of the time, we even visit their offices or work areas just to find out what exactly they do as a business, especially if they are in a very unpopular niche (for example, medicine wrapper repackaging, salmon eye preservation conveyor, club of tree huggers, anarchy forum sites).

Since I interviewed and managed almost all of our clients, all I had to do was study the internal affairs of our company, what happened after they signed a contract with us, literally from planning their websites to tracking their performance through our SEO and web analytics.

Study the state of the current website

So, after all the technicalities, the next thing was to face the real problem: our company’s website being trashed. To be honest, our website wasn’t really as horrible as my sister described it; the problem was that it simply wasn’t appropriate for our niche. Since we were a company that tackled company websites and SEO issues (be it a small business, an organization, or a corporation), our design lacked professionalism and class. The pale pink background and Monotype Corsiva font on our site were nothing more than a flashy satire of a dance creator’s website. From there, I knew where to modify our website.

Research, what exists and what does not

The main goal of this step is to achieve innovation and uniqueness on the first hit. I didn’t want to start things off the wrong way and end them the same way, so I started by reviewing my textbook knowledge and did it the basic way.

Of course, having the Internet and the Web is still the cheapest way to do research; however, if you have the extra cash, professional design books are a good addition to your research.

do it old school

I always believed in the power of the classic art form of drawing. With a little help from my typography books and calligraphy knowledge, I made sure to dabble and conceptualize everything on a blank piece of paper before putting it into the software. Here it was easier to correct mistakes, and ideas flow faster and more incessantly with pen and paper. I’m not entirely sure about that, but starting everything from pencil and paper gives me the freedom that I couldn’t get by pitching a concept into computer software.

Perhaps, personally and ergonomically speaking, pencils react faster than computers.

remember the unit

Element unity merges the divided parts of a design; therefore, the design elements of fonts, contrast, layout, text, content language, and images must match the overall idea of ​​the design. You should not mix the general idea of ​​your design (your target market or niche) with your own ideas (your own taste and design principle) because it would simply systematically destroy your design process.

SEO is part of all web design

Whether it’s for a web redesign or a new one, always keep SEO in mind while designing. An aesthetically perfect web design is useless if it cannot be read, crawled and indexed by search engines. Business websites are meant to be read by these search engines, so it’s best to avoid things that are not SEO friendly, such as excessive Flash animations, Black Hat SEO techniques, and keyword misuse.