You should not underestimate the creation of the design for your website. This takes time and it is an expensive task. Often the development of different small details may delay the start of your project with months and seriously increase its cost. This is explained with the designers’ wish to get into their stride and do the best they can.
Designers always have an opinion about the color, arrangement, and vision, as well as about the feeling that the website should incite. Staring with the logo and ending up with the slightest details around the shades and twirls, which no one notices but somehow feels their presence.
As an owner of a project and the person, who pays for this design, you have an opinion on the above-mentioned issues that bother the designer, too, and perhaps more, although you cannot define them in particular. You see something and start discussing it, believing that your personal opinion is the correct, most reliable, and expert one. Everyone corrects the design of their website the way they wish and consider best, sometimes without realizing that this is not the best possible choice.
The designer, on the other hand, aims at creating the most beautiful and user-friendly design and somehow satisfying your often illogical and non-expert ideas. The more the changes made to the design in order to satisfy your vision, and the more the reshapes of small details – changing the peach (yes, some people think this is a color) into “not so peachish” but rather “close to peachish” – the more the motivation of the designer is exhausted. In the end, the designer will provide you with a product that you will be pleased with, only to get rid of you as soon as possible. The designer will be dissatisfied with their work, sorry that nothing is left of the initially perfect and stylish design that they proposed, and that the whole idea has been visually ruined.
Unfortunately, all this bears an effect on the overall feeling left in consumers when using the website. You like it and think that you have achieved the maximum but it turns out that consumers cannot find the price of the product in the online store or that they cannot see the registration link on the website, while in the end – this is the major purpose of the project.
Some time ago, I worked on a project in which a client, who plunged so deep into the small details that only when the website was launched in exploitation it turned out that although the major functionality of uploading photos into the gallery was perfectly programmed, we have missed putting the “upload” button. This way it was impossible for consumers to reach the page for photos upload and the entire functionality became unusable. Of course, the problem was rapidly and easily solved but after a compromise over button’s positioning, which more or less required more work, rearranged the design and was positioned in a place where we would not have thought of if we had remembered it in the very beginning.
As you have already learned, you can buy the design at a price varying from USD 35 to USD 150. This is an easy way to get it fast, easy, and cheap. If you lack the money to invest in a unique design, developed especially for you, this is a really good option. Naturally, if you have the money, the best option is to hire a designer or a design studio to draw something special for you.
Although it seems complicated, the communication with designers is one of the nicest things that will happen to you because they are people of art. You will immediately find out whether you are dealing with a designer-butcher-welder or a real artist. The first one simply positions buttons and boxes, while the other creates a vision and feelings; the first one selects the colors according to their current mood, while the other creates emotional experiences through them.
The easiest way to explain to the designer how you imagine the design is not to do it.
You should give minimum information about the type of website and what you expect from the designer. For instance, the project is an online store, a media website, an online game, and so on. These simple words bring certain standards in the designer’s head, while as far as the vision is concerned, it is up to them to decide. You will be surprised by the outcome of the work of an artist’s mind, which has not been burdened with your personal visual ambitions.
The other alternative is not recommended but I have to warn you about the harm it may cause – a design created by the client, who is not a designer at all. This is a frequent phenomenon – the client goes to the web studio and shows what they have created on Paint or another graphic design software, self-educating themselves how to use it, being absolutely unaware of the consumer’s psychology, the major website development principles, and without observing a single set standard.
Unfortunately, there are two types of designers’ reaction – either to do what they want or what the client wants. If they choose the first option, there is a chance to convince you that their work is preferable and the website will be better. If they choose the other alternative, they will do what you want. This will leave you most satisfied because of the fact that you will see what you wanted and what you imagined.
In addition, you have initially approved the design by handing it on a silver platter, respectively there will be fewer corrections. This is not the most professional way to react but, on the other hand, if every day a designer has to deal with pretentious clients, do their best to finally get rid of them as fast as possible and leave them satisfied, this is more than great, isn’t it?
I know that you can go over and over the above-mentioned lines and read them tens of time and still, this will not make you give up on your urge to interfere in designer’s work. I have seen companies where everyone pokes their noses into the design, starting with the executive director, the commercial and technical directors, the system administrator, the editor-in-chief, and sometimes even the cleaner. Is it possible for the design to satisfy everyone along the chain? The question is more than rhetorical. That is why I advise you to let designers do their job the best way they can. This is art and the less you intervene in something you have no idea about, the less the harm and the more designers will praise you 🙂
