Do you really need a webdesign?

I say yes and no.
There are millions of pages out there working fine without a special design.
Pages people made for themselves, friends and their family.

As long as THEY like the look they can call it their own design. What you and I think about their pages does not matter.
That’s because each person on this earth has his own opinion about how things should be and look like. You can’t find two of the kind and therefore it will be just as many designs as it is living persons creating pages on the web. So it is, and so it will be.

You can of course change a person’s first natural feeling in many different ways, good or bad.
A good one is education. It could be about anything, and I’m sure you are an expert in some area that gives you more “feelings” then others who knows less in that subject.

Take wine. A beginner knows nothing, all wine taste almost the same. After a while testing and some study in the subject, they will find big differences in the taste.

The bad ones, is bad influence or pressure from other peoples opinions.
Don’t ever buy a design that you don’t like to 100% because the Agency say it best for your business. They only say so because they can’t deliver what you really like as they dont have the right skills or education to do so.

As we all have our brains in a left and right part, some people (strong left) does not have the ability to find ideas for their web design and need help from an agency.
(The concept of right brain and left brain thinking is developed from an American psycho-biologist Roger. W. Sperry. He discovered that the human brain has two very different ways of thinking. The right brain is visual and processes information in an intuitive and simultaneous way, looking first at the whole picture then the details. The left brain is verbal and processes information in an analytical and sequential way, looking first at the pieces then putting them together to get the whole.)

An artist or designer (strong right) can actually “see” the painting or the design on the white canvas long before they start painting. On the other hand, they have so many options to choose from, so they need a lot of input from their client to find out what he would like to see when all parts come together as a website.
Art Director and Graphic Designer
SEO Active Consulting SL, Fuengirola,
Spain
http://www.activemarbella.com

It’s not designed.

I sometimes get the question from new clients why our website www.activemarbella.com is designed as it is and my answer is: It’s not.
The page design was made in a couple of hours and is a result of what I felt to do right there and then. What I mean is, we spend our time on our client pages, not our own. If times come up to make changes, it will be a totally different look as I never ever can spend time to do the same design twice.
As a musician never write the same tune twice.

The actual design is not that important as many of you think. Your visitors all se it their own way and you can’t please them all!
The more stuff you put on your page, the more opinions you will get. Good or bad.

If your design is a black dot, right in the middle of your white landing page, the main options will be “Yes, I like it! “ or “No, I don’t like it!”.
The Yes-group has accepted your page as it is. How many? No one knows.

To get a few more No-no’s to like the design, you will need to do some changes, like:
- A green dot is ok!
- The dot should be more to the left!
- A bit smaller blue dot is ok, etc.
Lots of dot sizes, different positions, and colours to choose from (is it millions?), even on an almost empty page. If you do one of the changes above, you will probably loose some of your earlier Yes voters, after your changes.

A Mission impossible, so all you can do is trying to please as many as possible.
I think you should stick to a “clean look” on your web page, this will probably get you more Yes-voters than a “full dressed” landing page.

Take www.google.com or PayPal.com. I think that is a perfect pages, with exact the information you need, not much of layout except for the logotype but still good looking.

Then open www.yahoo.com and you will understand what I mean. A page loaded with a lot of crap I don’t need for a web search. Things I never ever will use so why should it be there?

That’s my personal opinion about these two, what’s yours?
Haze Westerlund
Graphic Designer Active Consulting SL
www.activemarbella.com