Want A Website That Does More Than Look Pretty? Why You Need A Website Designed, Not Decorated
Truth bomb: some “website design” is not actually design at all, it’s website decoration, and there is a huge difference between having a website designed and having a website decorated.
Website Design is So Much More Than Pretty Fonts and Colors
Website design includes both the planning and the creation of a website around the goals of the business. Website design is researched, intentional, and strategic.
The information architecture, site structure, the navigation, the conversion strategy, and how the website fits into the greater online marketing strategy can all play a part in reaching the goals of the website.
Things like layout, colors, fonts, and images also play a part as these are the vital forms of visual communication that work to support the goals as well.
Common goals that website design can help you reach
- Boost your credibility
- Increase trust
- Provide visitors with your information 24/7
- Guide website visitors towards healing
- Provide convenient access to your systems like client portals or online schedulers
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Inspire hope in your website visitors
How Website Design is Different Than Website Decoration
Website decoration is the process of adorning, embellishing, or beautifying a website.
Although decoration can be used to create an aesthetically pleasing space, it is not necessarily formed around achieving the goals of your website.
Decorators are concerned with the aesthetics without concern for strategy. An aesthetic-only approach means things like credibility, trust, communicating solutions, or guiding visitors towards healing may not even be considered.
And achieving these items on your website aren’t things that are possible to achieve through decoration alone. Here are some questions that help demonstrate why that is:
- Without perfect clarity on your primary call to action, how will you know what element on the page needs to draw the eye?
- Without knowing who your best fit client is, how will you know which images will connect with website visitors? Just beautiful ones? Or ones that will meet your website visitor where they are and inspire hope in their healing?
- Without mapping out your website, where will you guide your visitor to? What path are you carving out for them?
- If you don’t know what a website visitor needs to accomplish on your website, how will you know what navigation structure will be both usable and beautiful, not merely the most good looking?
A lot of times too, decorating won’t take into consideration things like context: who is the website for? What audience are we creating for?
A website for a 55 year old veteran with PTSD needs to be designed differently than a website for teens struggling with self-esteem.
A site that is decorated however, might result in a similar site for both the veteran and the teens: one that draws from trends instead of consciousness about the emotional and actual needs that a website visitor may have.
Decorating may also mean inserting things into the website that are not geared towards a fast-loading website or a website that focuses on what’s best for conversion. Case in point: all the websites incorrectly using sliders.
Website decoration answers the question: how can we make this look good?
Website design answers the question: how can we make this look good AND best achieve our goals?
Your Website Is Like Your Office: The Office Analogy For Decoration Vs Design
If you offer face-to-face therapy services, you have probably gone through the process of finding an office to practice out of.
When you first start to look for an office, you may have thought of stuff like location, accessibility, parking, heating and air conditioning, noise.
Why are these types of things important? Because these basic things are the foundation of a good healing space. No throw pillow or designer couch could ever compensate for a freezing cold office in the winter or paper thin walls being the only thing separating you and that awkwardly loud karate studio.
Is the decoration of your office space also important? Yes, totally! But do both. Find an office space that has the vital requirements and that can be beautiful too.
The same is true of your website. Your website needs to be strategic as well as beautiful. So get your website designed, not decorated.
You Need A Website That Works
The implication of having a website decorated instead of designed is that you may be left with something that is missing the depth of visual communication, the user experience, and the strategy of a designed website.
Sure, some designers will argue with me on this and say that decoration is sometimes also strategic. But without dipping into that space of the goals that a website needs to meet the decoration will be based on air.
You need a website that works for you. It needs to solve very specific problems, not just look pretty or trendy or modern.
When you start a website design project, a central question of concern ought to be: what problem in my practice will my website help me solve? If instead you are focusing on pretty things first, the potential efficacy of your website will be lost.
What do you think? Do you think I’m being too hard on the idea of decorating websites? I’d love to know what you think. It’s super fun to hear from you so feel free to reach out or tweet me anytime. I love hearing from you.