Common mistake, blame it on the website design

Things does go wrong or in better words, things may not perform according to your expectation. I have worked on 100s of websites and with dozens of web marketing inhouse and client teams. In most of the cases, the non-performance of the website boils down to redesigning of website. Every hard hitting meetings ends up in a new design and then few months of sleep, expecting some good results. Whenever the top management wants to get involved with web marketing, he will start with redesigning the website. A new manager comes in, he goes for a new design.

Why people blame website design?

Only reason is that they feel (I repeat, they feel) there is something wrong with the website design. Another reason is, they have seen the design for some time, got bored and now want a change. Recently, one of our client launched his website, it was an information rich website with some courses. Everybody liked the design and we started marketing for it. Within a couple of weeks, we noticed another design with rich red color flashes. It looked better and we kept working on other parts of web marketing. Another couple of weeks, the whole design was changed and put a new one with gray shades. The reason, “Sales are not happening even when we have some traffic”.

Dismantling website designing

Before going into website designing blame game, let us get some facts right. Website design is just not all about look and feel. It has two parts:

You need to get your Engineering right before getting the artist work right. We used to spend 3 to 4 days in getting the right engineering done. Engineers generally don’t get Art right, so after engineering we used to make way for our artistic designers. Let not Engineer do the Art work and vice-versa but do debate and discuss. Remember the final work for Engineering issues must go to Engineer and Art issues to graphic designers.

Let’s take an example on how we design website:

(this was the website we had to redesign, the reason, sales not happening as expected. I won’t have redesign the website but I wanted to put a new architecture on the site.)
(Image missing)
Now we started Engineering:
First step was to meet the expectations. These are the probable questions that the people might ask.

Differentiation to push sales:
(Sorry! Can’t reveal this)

Now we started asking:

After all this analysis web marketing team came up with a sample design. The sample design is them passed on to the other web marketing heads for final review. The web marketing department approves it on the basis of:

Sample website Engineered by web marketing team.

(Image missing)

Artists are Artists for website designs

Once the engineering is done, the artists (designers) enter and make it look really good.
(Image missing)

Now, the magic, SHUT UP

Now if you are expecting that the new design will create magical sales figures, forget it. Designs are never complete. In the above phase only the skeleton is done on based of your log analysis, intuition, market knowledge. Different layer for good inputs:

Faggot vs single sticks – Good story for website designs

Do you remember the story? (Visit http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/simplify-problems/). Redesigning the whole website is like breaking the Faggot but redesigning some section or redoing some text is like breaking a single stick. If you can look at the log file and keep modifying sections by sections then you might end up with a better design. This do change slowly slowly, don’t believe me, just get inspired by Amazon

Tags: amazon, design, engineering, google, logo, SEO, usability, web, website design