When potential client come to me for a website they often bring misconceptions about what a website is and what I, as a web designer should do for them. These misconceptions fall into three broad categories. Actually there is only one mistake, forgetting that a website is a publication, but that mistake typically shows up in one or more of three ways.

Web pages are technical so have a techie do the site.

On the face of it, this makes sense. Websites are highly technical constructs and technical expertise is required to get them up and keep them up. Now, if I went into a magazine publisher’s office and said that printing is a highly technical operation (which it is), you should put your printers in charge of designing and editing your magazine, I’d be lucky if I got off with only a strange look or two.

Quality printing is critical to a quality publication but that’s simply a technical detail. Leaving aside the business aspects, magazines survive on the quality and relevance of their writing. How is a website any different? The HTML code of a web page is nothing more than the virtual equivalent of printing.

Web pages need to look good so have a graphic artist do the site.

You should see where I’m going with this. A magazine’s art department needs to make the publication look good. But the design needs to support the content, not the other way around. Art departments don’t run magazines. They are at least fifth in line behind the publisher, editors, contributors and the marketing department. That’s what works.

Your website is a publication. If it’s small it will be more like a brochure than a magazine. A brochure’s design may catch the eye, but if it has no decent information it is quickly destined for the circular file. A flashy website won’t even catch the eye. By the time your visitor shows up, she’s already past the cover and looking for the table of contents. You have less than 10 seconds to convince her to stay. Do you have the content to do that?

Web pages need good search engine ranking so write them for Google.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming critical to high page ranking. True. But filling your text with keywords for Google, MSN or Yahoo may make your site easier to index. It won’t entice the visitors that are the number one search engine ranking factor. That is some combination of traffic and inbound links.

Like good design and good technical underpinnings, SEO is just a detail you need to attend to. A magazine writer has two audiences he has to please, the reader and the editor. A web writer simply has a third, the search engine. That doesn’t mean writing only to Google. It means keeping Google in mind as well as the site visitor. Fortunately, writing well to your intended human audience, typically works for Google, too.

Search engine keywords should be no more than a style guide for the typical website. The people running search engines are very, very smart. They will not be fooled for long by any clever SEO trick that you can do. Every few month the headlines tell us of another company that is suing Google because their SEO tricks have ceased to work. They don’t win.

Conclusion

If you simply remember that a website is a publication you are half way home. Publications live and die by how well they match their content to their audience. Design, printing and marketing all play crucial roles in that success but only if there is content worth caring about. Letting any one of those departments run a magazine is a sure recipe for failure. Your website is no different.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 15th, 2006 at 12:37 am and is filed under Best Practices. 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.