Jan
08
5 Web Design Pitfalls
I know this has been talked about before by a lot of bloggers. And they’ve probably talked about it far better than I will. That said, here’s a list!
- Blindly following trends
The grunge look, web 2.0 (so shiny!), hand drawn everything, word balloons, font styles, etc. We have all fallen prey to at least one design trend in our time, if not many. It’s tough to balance what customers demand with what we believe is the best design for their website. That said, please try to avoid vapid, trend filled portfolios. A great example of work is a wide range – one that highlights each client site and makes it special. Great design and standing out from the crowd: this is the goal you should strive for, every time. - Avoiding trends because they’re trendy
Is this a contradiction to #1? Not quite – avoiding the overuse of trends and styles is smart, but avoiding trends just because they’re trendy isn’t. The trick to going from a good designer to a great designer is to adopt genuinely cool and useful design tricks (aka the trendy stuff) and making it into something uniquely your own – and relevant to your client. - Resenting W3C
Yeah, the world wide web consortium are comprised of sticklers. They’re like the British elite, looking down their nose at your use of p tags around lists while they sniff loudly and drink Earl Grey. Don’t let their intimidating documentation get you down. The W3C is the standard for good web design practices, and it would behoove you to utilize their services, rather than resenting them. - Digging your heels in when it comes to learning x
Whether you will just never sit down and learn html, photoshop, javascript, css, php or whatever, you’re doing yourself a tremendous disservice and preventing yourself from competing. I think we’ve all set a limit where we sit down, give it a try, and decide that we’ll tackle everything BUT the really hard thing that irritates us because we can’t figure it out fast enough. Don’t be the idiot savant who just knows photoshop. Gaining a working knowledge of html or css isn’t tough, and it’s tremendously useful to you and your clients. But your partner/coworker/mother knows z and does all the z-related work for you? Consider how much they’d appreciate it if you took a little time to understand just what it is that they do. Just appreciating the effort and skill set that they have is nice, but knowing more about their skill set will improve yours, and probably allow you to make their job a little bit simpler when working together. - Trying to convince your client that they’re being stupid because they don’t want to do what you want to do
Remember who’s paying the bills. It’s admirable to make a hard sell to a tough client because you do know that your idea is going to work spectacularly for them. But there will always be people in the world who really, really love scrolling marquees, flash intros, and embedded auto-playing wav files. Fight the good fight to convince them why your solution is more effective and beneficial, but avoid resenting their insanely stupid demands. If they want to pay for crappy web design, let them. Just don’t put their resulting site in your portfolio.
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