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Web Graphic Design for Small Businesses
An anonymous reader writes "I'm a competent geek running a one-man-show for a small business. I do everything IT in this company; servers, email, desktop support, managing Ethernet switches, cash registers, inventory database, and the company website. My boss has asked me to 'punch up' the website to make it more appealing. Although I can hold my own with HTML, PHP and a couple SQL products, graphic design isn't one of my strengths. I'm looking for some advice on how to improve the site without making it overstimulating for the webophobic. It's also important that it conform to ADA accessibility guidelines. In particular, I'm looking for books or tutorial websites that teach the basics of good graphic design — how to make it more appealing without losing the ability to communicate effectively. Also, I would appreciate suggestions for tools to use to make this more efficient (Windows and Linux are both OK)."
One of my favorite that really impacted that way I developed web sites: "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug.
It's easy for engineers to imagine that these types of things are the same as the mathematical equation required for coding. These tasks are more esoteric and require a sensitivity to process and inputs that can't be gleaned from a single information source.
If money is an issue I suggest mining the local college for design students.
I would build the site on some simple CMS like CMS Made Simple, http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ Then, I would add a ready-made CSS template from a site like http://www.oswd.org/ Also, you could just suggest to your boss that you buy the design along with the CSS. There are tons of freelance designers on the web with excellent references available. Our company has bought some amazing designs for as little as 200$. Try a site like http://www.elance.com/ for starters.
I think the book you are talking about is "The Principles of Beautiful Web Design" by Jason Beard. It is a decent basic overview of graphic design.
Problem is, when you hire a graphic designer, what you get tends more towards moving, blinking crap, or pretty-looking but unusable pages where you can't figure out what's a link and what's not and that break in a browser different than what the designer uses, than it does towards good layout, color schemes and art.
A web site is not a magazine ad or a glossy brochure, but those are the roots of the field of "graphic design".
Hire a graphic designer to make your logos and graphics, sure, and maybe rough-out a look; but unless they've had extensive training in user interfaces, HTML, and CSS, don't hand your whole site over to a graphic designer.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Sure, just blatantly steal someone else's work.
There is nothing about being a "geek" or knowing HTML, CSS, or javascript that magically grants someone designer chops.
And there's one other *extremely important* fact that I've learned: there's nothing that being a graphic designer learns that magically grants them webpage design chops.
If the web was run by graphics designers, all the pages would be extremely pretty. Most would be stored as individual flash files, but some of the less important text would just be as represented as images. No text would actually be stored as text, and each page would contain roughly a sentence or two worth of actual text. To find anything meaningful would require somewhere in the neighborhood of eight clicks.
In other words, they can make the web fluffy. Today, the place of the graphic artist is starting to be more and more just devoted to logos, banners, and advertisements - like they were before the web (mostly because the web used to be just those things for a lot of companies, and is now becoming a lot more than that). The usability people are taking up the task of writing pages, and those people are very much geeks. They're the ones who make new kinds of widgets that work the way that they do for desktop apps - with things like autocomplete, AJAX, unified designs, usage of CSS, etc, standard layout and standard widget usage. These are pretty much always two different groups. Usability people fight to make things look and work naturally, while graphic artists fight to make their pages stand out and work different from everyone else's. So you aren't likely to be both.
So if I were in your position (and I actually am in my company), I'd focus on cognitive science usability studies and take my ideas of how to make things nicer from that. People who actually try to get information out of your site will appreciate it...whereas they mostly won't care much what it looks like for more than the first three seconds or so (for most companies, anyway. If you happen to sell something that's main feature is it's prettiness, then you might consider making a pretty site more important than one that you can find out about your business from).
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I'd advise extra care if using this approach. Marketing people are not usability experts, and users do NOT want to be sucker-punched with marketing drivel every time they visit your site. You may get their attention the first time with a slick home page, but if the implementation makes it too cumbersome to actually use the site, you can bet they'll probably never come back. It's too easy to go somewhere else.
>>Do really you think you can train a graphical designer to code with a few book
... literature major (code monkey by night). But even so, my designs were pretty good; literally hundreds of real estate agents chose my designs (as opposed to the ones made my predecessors) for their sites. And mine never had the browser-specific issues, long page loads, and other technical issues that my sister's did.
>>and tutorials, and not get out results fitting for thedailywtf?
YES, I really think he can. Why? Because I did it.
Growing up, I had always been the nerdy one in my family (I was programming (in BASIC) at age 10, and haven't stopped since), and my sister was always the artistic one. But a few years ago, we both found ourselves in the same occupation: web designer. I was making web site designs for real estate agents, and she was making them for various organizations at her school.
Her designs were definitely prettier than mine. A lot prettier, which makes sense because she was a graphic design major in college, and I was a
My point in this story is that an artistic bent is important. A lifelong penchant for graphics and design is a real asset in doing any kind of graphic design, whether it's web pages, catalog layouts, or whatever. And if you want to be the best designer in your industry, you'll probably need it. But if you're willing to read books and web articles, you can become an extremely competent web designer, no matter what your background is. All it takes is:
A) learning the basic rules of things like contrast, white-space, maximum line length, etc.
B) learning what your clients want from a website (I found it fairly common that what was considered "good" by any respected designer was the exact opposite of what my intended audience considered "good"; hey, they're not designers either!)
C) making an effort to look at other sites out there and evaluate what is good/bad about their design
D) and finally, being willing to experiment. You aren't going to get added to the CSS Zen Garden with your first attempt. Hell, you're probably not even going to get something usable out of your first 5-10 attempts. But if you stick with it, constantly evaluate what you did right/wrong, and don't stop trying, eventually you'll start making designs both you and your customer can appreciate, and after you make enough "winners" you'll soon find yourself in a comfortable flow of producing quality (if not awe-inspiringly beautiful) designs.
Recommendations:
Web Graphics for Non-Designers (which is really "web design for non-designers") was by far the best book I found for people like us. My copy is from 2002, but there might be a more recent one; even if there isn't, the book is still completely relevant today. If you want to learn all the basic rules, start with this book.
Try other design/usability books; I have several on my shelf that I found useful, and learned a thing or two from, but which aren't really solid enough for me to recommend. Instead, just try going to your local book store (preferably a big one with great selection) and leaf through their web design/usability offerings. Even if you don't buy any of them, just skimming the recommendations and sample designs they offer can be very valuable.
While we're talking about usability, I also strongly recommend Don't Make Me Think. Now, you might be thinking usability and design are two separate things; you'd be wrong. They are two different things, but they're not at all separate; they intertwine with each other in pivotal ways, and if you want to make successful designs you need to consider usability aspects. Don't Make Me Think is like a bible in the usability field, and it's also a relatively quick read (the author does this deliberately to make the book itself more usable).
Books are great, and the two I just named are particularly great, but you'll also want to keep tabs on various web design sites. I have an iGoogle tab filled with RSS feeds from
This is where someone good at HTML/CSS comes in. The catch is that they have to realize they suck at graphic design, and not try to do any changes - just take the photoshop stuff, and turn it into proper HTML/CSS and chop up the images appropriately.
I sort of see this area as a gradient, that goes from "programmer" to "web developer" to "web designer" to "graphic designer".
At one end, you have programmers that don't understand web technology, who make pages that require explicitly clicking on a "Submit" button instead of being able to press enter in a search box, do POSTs where a POST should not be required, stupid use of URL parameters, sensitive data in cookies, etc. On the other far end, you have graphic designers who don't understand the web at all, and you end up with something ranging from a print brochure migrated to the web, to a site designed entirely in flash for no good reason other than "the transition effects are cool".
Towards the middle, you have programmers that understand web technology, but can't design worth a crap. You can identify these people as the ones that back up their claims that they know how to design websites by saying they know HTML and Photoshop. When they design a site, you get an ugly, but functional site.
You also have the web designers, who came from a graphic design background but maybe understand some HTML. Some of them are the types you just take the nicely-designed-in Photoshop page from and turn it into HTML/CSS, and others know how to do that properly on their own. In my experience most of these people don't try to program at all, but if they do it's the sort of thing that ends up on the dailywtf.
I've also met a couple of people that are very good at both web design and development. Both came from the graphic design side and then learned how to program. I think these people are few and far between, though - even though I'm sure there's a great many people that claim to be here.
Speak before you think
Most of my work where we had to worry about this was online annual reports, which MUST be accessible (by law) to anyone who asks for them. That being the "public" in "publicly-traded corporation", but yeah. I remember having to jump through so many hoops on [super large global corporation]'s annual report that I finally broke down and told them that when they find the one blind investor they have, call me, I'll go to his/her house and explain it to them if they want, 'cause that would've been easier.
Also, finally last year I got a chance to speak to a real live blind person about this, and they confirmed pretty much what you just said. Blind people, in general, can't really use the web without assistance. When I asked him about that super-neat braille terminal Whistler uses in Sneakers, he seemed dubious about it at best :(.
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I'll let you in on a little secret. That's where most graphic designers start too.
Scour the page for a few sites you like. Revisit old sites you've made. Open a bunch of books of design you enjoy and find some inspiration.
Starting from a white canvase is always more difficult than at least finding a pallete that inspires you.