One of the first things we do when meeting with new customers is to help them understand the role of design in a web project. They are often surprised to learn that web design is strategic, not decorative.
Web design is a professional discipline that draws from many related specialties, including user experience design (UX), user interface design (UI), accessibility, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), branding, readability, typography, and front-end coding languages.
Your website’s content is its principal design element
Once we’ve created a prototype for your site’s content, we use that content to shape your site’s design. We begin to think about how to arrange it and augment it so that it supports your business goals.
Web design is the design of information. It controls how people find, understand, and use the information on your website.
All of the research we do to establish what your users need in order to reach their own goals on your website now informs the way we lay out each page. For example, each page’s design shows at a glance what information on the page is most important, where to find supplemental information if necessary, and how to ask for help. It also gives users a quick and easy way to share your site’s information with someone else, and it presents a call to action: an invitation for the user to take some desired action involving your business goals.
This likely won’t happen the first time a user visits your site, or the second or third or tenth time, but if you keep your content fresh and useful by monitoring its performance, it will happen.