Here’s a familiar scenario: you’ve spent months working with your developers, creating a website you are really proud of. If they have done their job right it will be search engine optimized and cross-browser tested so that it is fully browser compatible with the biggest names in the browser game.

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A website is a tool. Designed properly it will allow your business to grow. Designed poorly it will become yet another obstacle you place in the way of those who might want to take up your services or buy your products.

The design of a website of course is always a complex affair which takes into account functionality, design trends and the target audience. Each of these is subject to research, analysis and development and any competent web design studio will have a clear methodology regarding these and the manpower to actually run them properly.

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There are as many ways to design a website as there are, conceivably, reliable website design firms on the planet. While this may throw the door wide open to possibilities I can tell you straight away that this is not so. Website design which works to promote your business, increase its internet reach and reinforce your branding has severe constraints.

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The 21st century, the age of information, is not without its paradoxes. It has been marked, since the beginning, with a shaking up of the old business models and the opportunity to do thing differently and in this trend it has consistently challenged the traditional newspaper industry which has had to cope with falling circulation figures and fewer readers.

There have been quite a few instances, over the years, when internet-only newspapers (like The Huffington Post) appeared and offered a business model to follow, which, it must be said, traditional newspapers resisted.

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We have all seen those long, never-ending, one-page long sales letter websites which begin with large red letters screaming something obvious, go on to promise the earth, and then try to wear you down with a about a dozen useless add-ons to the original offer, a discount that is always time-limited, testimonials, video demos and the ‘Still not convinced? Then try this…” approach.

The thing is they do not work. Their proliferation on the web is testimony to the ability of those who sell them (because most of them are re-selling products) to sell them well. The fact that there are so many acts as a persuasive trigger in its own right and new players with little experience blindly copy them thinking they will work.

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When we set up in web design oh, so many years ago, we worked locally. Our first client was a pizza delivery shop in Stockport. The second was his cousin delivering pizza in Birmingham. For a while we almost thought that the pizza business was our destiny. What changed everything was the fact that our site, thanks to the SEO efforts of our SEO engineers, started getting traffic from all over.

We suddenly had customers from Australia, New Zealand, the US, Greece, Belgium, Cyprus, France and even Russia. Each site became for us a foray into new markets, new clients, new business cultures and an opportunity to create more than just a website, an opportunity to help create a tool that gave our client a true advantage in their home market.This meant that our business advisers took their home-grown, honed UK business development knowledge and reshaped it, morphed it, augmented it and tested in new markets. They did hours of research, poured over long tracts of data and spent half their lives living online and the result was that what we did meshed and worked. The websites we built became platforms helping our clients work better and make more money.

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Each week we come across literally dozens of clients who tell us something similar and because we work online ourselves and pour a great deal of who we are into what we do it strikes a chord and we understand it. At the same time we know that in a different context this kind of approach and sentiment makes no real sense at all.

A dentist’s drill only costs a few hundred dollars and it can be bought by anyone who understands the simple instructions required to use it but that does not mean that “a whole day spent drilling on my teeth” is any kind of activity anyone would safely contemplate. Arguably, drilling teeth is no less a beneficial activity, as it leads to better oral health and better general health, than spending time working on your site so the question arises why is one considered more professional than the other.

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Or how to choose the right resolution for your website.

We have a more detailed explanation about what the “screen resolution” is in the “Articles” section of our website so if you are interested in more information about it please take a look at this article. The standard resolution we use at WebDirectStudio to build websites is 1024 x 768 at the moment. So if you want it to be different please let us know. Let us show you a few examples of different website resolutions at the most popular 15” inch screen.

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Having been part of a web design studio that handled three new projects every week and had to deal with 30 queries a day I can tell you first hand that web design…huh-huh, it’s like brain surgery. You can go at it with a good quality hacksaw and a pair of later gloves but we wouldn’t really advise you to do it.

It’s a good analogy, except it’s totally untrue. Web design, as the proliferation of people who call themselves web designers attests to, is neither like brain surgery nor rocket science. At its most basic it’s like building something using Lego blocks. A child can do it.

 

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Back in the 80s we all laughed when the suits at Coke used a machine translator and turned a multi-million dollar campaign centred around the slogan “Coke gives life” into an international joke as their Hong Kong campaign read “Coke brings your ancestors back from the grave”.

Languages have the potential to unlock worlds and help you reach markets which might otherwise be closed to you, provided you understand what you are doing and why you are doing it and are willing to invest in getting the right kind of translation service going for you.

 

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