Twice this week I have come across clients who have had their websites designed by family or friends of friends. In both cases the websites remained unfinished, unpublished and languishing.
In the worst case, one client had paid money to a web designer and had waited for over a year for her website, which never arrived. Her calls and emails to the designer were unanswered. This has been money down the drain for her despite the designer saying the site was 80% there. In fact it was 80% NOT there.
These cases highlight to me assumptions that designing websites is easy, cheap and "my 12 year old son could easily do it".
I have been involved in Advertising, Graphic Design and Web Design for over 20 years and can safely and with some authority say, that designing good websites is none of those things. In fact the time and technical know how required to build a good website is considerably more than designing for print. But the fact remains renumeration for web work is 1/4 of that for print.
How has this situation/perception come about? Why is a job that takes more time and skill to do, worth so much less?
Unfortunately I don't know, but I can make a few educated guesses. Websites as we know them, have evolved from plain text online docs with basic headings, to feature rich online documents with pictures, video, blogs, news feeds, galleries etc etc. It did used to be, and still is, easy to throw up a few pages of text onto the web. All you need is a web address, a server to load it up on and away you go.
As websites continue to evolve however they are far more "designed" than they used to be. The skill involved in designing a website is equal to that of designing a decent piece of POS for a bilboard for instance. There are numerous things to consider in a modern website including navigation, usablility, up to date constantly changing technology, Content Management etc, the list goes on.
Whole new jobs of Information Architect, Interface Designer etc have been created to really understand complex areas of the way a user interfaces and interacts with the online world. Specialist web development companies employ these people to make sure that the websites they design, usually for corporate clients that understand the need for such skills, are future proof, well designed, feature rich and easily maintained and added to.
A completed modern CMS based (database driven) website with complex information gathering and interactivity is a huge technological feat that involves, designers, developers, planners and architects. It is most definitely not in the range of your average 12 year old. Not any more.
Yet the cheap and easy perception remains, even in the wider advertising industry. Another reason for this is the proliferation of FREE website build sites, where the client fills in a complex form chooses a few colors, pays a bit for hosting and support and they have an online shop ready to go in minutes. Its the hosting the website builder wants, which is a lucrative and passive money earner for them.
These types of sites will not go away. In fact they will proliferate and there will always be a market for them for business start ups and the like. In the long run however, these websites are not thought out properly. The new business start up guy/gal is seduced by "The power of the Internet" jargon that promises instant riches, they leap in to an un-researched and un-thought out (is that a word?) market with a free website that in actual fact, doesn't "do the business".
Ultimately it all comes down to design. Anyone can sign up to wordpress and create a website cum blog and these sites can function as excellent business websites too. I have a friend who is not a designer but creates well performing (Google rating) wordpress websites that really work for his clients. They look dreadful. But the point is it doesn't matter for those clients as they are making money from their ugly websites. Thats all that matters to them. He does research his markets for his clients however, and they pay him to do that. He charges very little for the actual website, because they are not designed. But they are resaerched. The FREE website build guys don't do that for you, so more often than not you are wasting your money on not only a bland template website but one that is also un-researched.
Nope, the beautifully designed, and advanced researched website is only appreciated by those companies that care about how they look in public. It's the usual supsects, those who care about their brand.
The upshot of all this is of course a proliferation of awful looking, poorly maintained and languishing websites, built on the cheap, cluttering up cyber space and giving the impression web design is cheap and easy.
Trust me. It 'aint.
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