Web Design Tips - How Many of Your Web Designer

Talking to the web designer

What should your website look like? Obviously, the vaguer you are, the less helpful your suggestions will be. A good starting place is to look at other websites with a similar subject matter. From these, you can either decide what you like, or, through a process of comparison, realise what you don't want and thus partly recognise what is actually important to you. Other interesting avenues of approach come through associative thinking: consider movies, books, music and artwork that you think convey the sort of 'feeling' you want from the website. Tell your web designer about them: maybe he can capture some of that je ne sais quoi! Expand your expectations of your website from just a 'look' - maybe it can be a 'feeling', or also a 'sound'; can you get your visitors to imagine the smell of the website? If you are selling flowers online, you may want them to!
Communication is key. This is an adjunct to the point above, but do not be afraid to go into detail for your web designer. Even if he disagrees with some of your stylistic or organisational choices, everything you suggest will communicate more of what you want your website to be. Details about how it should behave tell us a lot about its real purpose and about what makes it unique, just as the style of a piece of writing can tell us something about its larger meaning. There is, of course, a caveat to this advice: if you go beyond suggesting and into dictating; if you only talk and don't listen: then you aren't communicating any more, you're only yelling. You're paying for your web designer's time and yes, he is your employee for the moment. But remember that you are paying him because he is a professional: he may not be an expert in your field, but he is an expert at online presence. It's precisely the fact that you are an expert in your field, which the website is about, and he is an expert in his field, which is designing the website, which makes it so important to meet in the middle when it comes to discussion of the site itself.
Content rules the internet.

You may have read it before. "Content is king / everything / why they come." Fortunately, this is true. It's what makes the internet useful, and it's why search engines like Google that pay the closest attention to well-ordered and original content are the most-used, and most-useful. Unfortunately, it does mean that you are going to have to do more work for your web site than simply writing an 'About Us' page and hoping web-surfers google your exact company name!

The best web designers will write copy (i.e. words) to go on your website, and they will make it grammatical, attractive, punchy, and all that good stuff. But even the best professional designer can't learn your years of experience and then translate that to the screen. You have an insurmountable advantage: you really know what you're talking about. This means that you should be creating lots of content for your website. Why? ^^^^^ - because "Content is king"! If Googlers search for specialist phrases which are relevant to your business / charity / cottage-industry / photo-album, they should get hits for your website! If they're not, that means that all of your experience in this specific field - all that experience that differentiates you from the rest of the site-owners on the internet - is going to waste.

This point cannot be overemphasised. The more work you put into the website, the more you get out. You aren't paying your web designer to be an expert in your field: you're paying him to a) tell you what I've just told you; and b) translate those great bits of information, articles (like this one), specialist notes, tips and loads of details, into meaningful (and searchable!) places on the internet that will make your website very special and very popular.