Designing Our Way To Disaster

How to build a great looking website that nobody but you ever sees, in one easy step.

It's exciting putting your first few websites online.

You feel as if you're walking out in to a spotlight, in front of everybody on earth, and you want to look your best.

But watch your step, you may be about to trip over a classic webmaster mistake on your way to center stage.

If you spend too much time trying to look your best, the spotlight may never reach you.

Sound Familiar?

Do you find yourself endlessly fiddling with your site's layout, and changing the logo again and again? Are you worried about the border around the menu? Are you always pondering the right color for the links? Have you asked everybody you know whether they think the photo of your dog should be moved just a little bit to the left?

All these aesthetic details of your site can seem so very important.

To you.

You Might Want To Sit Down For This

The bigger picture is um, well, gulp...

Nobody else really cares.

If you observe your own web surfing, you'll probably discover that you have limited interest in all the little artistic details of other people's websites.

Your readers will likely experience your site's design as casually as you experience theirs.

Even if our readers did care about our designs, we aren't really fully in charge of our site's appearance anyway.

In print media such as newspapers and magazines perfectionist designers can delight in 100% control over their designs.

No such luck on the web, where our reader's choice of computer, monitor, browser, and browser settings all play a big role in how our site looks to them.

Be assured, somebody out there is looking at your site in 30 point type of a crazy font with images turned off and link colors set to neon green.

And it looks stupid. And there's not much you can do about it.

The Best Selling Book Of All Time

The graphic design of our sites is kind of like the cover of a book.

The Bible is the best selling book of all time, and the cover usually contains nothing but the words, "The Holy Bible".

Obviously, people buy The Bible for what's inside.

And don't forget, our job as webmasters is a lot harder than the book seller's job of getting buyers to the cash register one time. We need the traffic that comes from loyal readers making repeat visits.

Thus, the graphic design of our site, the cover of our book, is much less important than whether readers find our site in the first place, and whether once they've found us, they find something interesting and useful inside the cover.

Which brings us finally to...

It Could Happen To You

In twelve years of designing sites for myself and clients, I've seen (and made) this mistake over and over (and over and over and over) again.

There's an explosion of inspiration about the site at the beginning, and most of this energy gets invested in the graphic design. Tweaks, modifications, edits, the change orders can go on for months. No effort is spared.

And when it's all over we have a great looking site...

...that few people ever see.

Whoops! What happened?

The Classic Mistake

We've exhausted our time, energy, inspiration and budget on the design.

Once the site is up, and our ego is satisfied, we discover we're pooped, and don't want to promote the site right now. Maybe later.

Or maybe never.

And hey, I just got a great idea for a new site, let's see if the domain name is available!

This sounds like a silly story, and it is.

But it's a true story too, one that's been repeated a million times over the last decade by site owners who are now wondering why Net publishing didn't work out for them.

It doesn't have to be your story.

Sure, Ok, invest whatever time you want in making your site look the way you want it to look. We all have human egos, let's be realistic.

Go ahead, have your fun.

But recognize it is fun you're having, and the real work of your site has yet begun.

Be sure to leave lots and lots of time and energy left over for creating great content and especially, promoting your site.

If you don't, you may wind up being one of the few people who ever sees your great looking site.

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