EightBlack.

We seem to be building a lot of websites lately - for Murcotts, Open Windows, Kings Cove Metung.

To be honest, I dont enjoy this type of work. To me, the website design and construction business has become a commodity market.

At one end of the scale - you’ve got the big end of town online firms that design massively overpriced, over complicated and self serving sites that have a higher need to win awards than serve their clients well.

At the other end of the scale, you have the template world, where for $40 to $50 bucks you can download a site, hire a freelancer to mock up what you want and voila, you’re in business.

And everything in between.

For example, your brother-in-law’s colleague at work has a next door neighbour who knows a guy who builds websites in his spare time.

But back to my gripe. Usability.

Without pretending I’m Jakob Nielsen - the Usability Guru out of the US who’s company Nielsen Norman charges US$35K for a usability study, there’s a simple way of working out what works and what doesnt.

It’s easy.

Ask.

Ask your customers, your suppliers, your staff.

Then ask people you dont know.

Good web design is understanding that people dont read websites. They scan them. Want an example. Pick up any self respecting newspaper.

Have a read of this article by the late Ken Giddens, one of the X10 Faculty members. It’s titled “Marketing Your Website” and its a must read for any site owner.

To visit a tribute page to Ken (his family lost to him to a heart disease late 2005) visit this  special X10 page here. 

Subscribe to more posts like this

Related Posts:

Add to | | | View blog reactions

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.