Professional Web Designers

I like simple websites. Robin Williams likes simple, uncluttered websites. However, I read somewhere recently (I didn’t make note of it at the time and now I can’t find it) that web designs are changing. They are becoming, like many modern things, geared toward the Millennials who like all things fast-paced, and exciting, which means moving, busy, hyper-active websites.

As I searched the web for examples of pages I like and don’t like I found something interesting. I found a number of websites for individuals and companies that do website design. I thought that might be a good place to find examples of “good” websites. However, I was mistaken. Many of the websites of designers were not designed very well. For example: http://www.alteredimpressions.com/ is a webpage that to me looks messy, clutter, and hard to follow. There are too many words on it and it just isn’t attractive.

On this page for professional web design, the text flows beyond the borders of the box and into over the Copyright insignia: http://risingline.com/ It seems very unprofessional to me.

The designers of http://www.sabiadesign.com/ chose a font that is very hard to read. It is small and is doing some strange pixeling and it’s pink! The page contains typos. And to top it off, there is a graphic that looks like curly hair that seems pretty distracting to me. I thought for sure with the pink font and curly hair graphic, this was a woman’s company, but I was wrong. In addition to all that, the designer talks a lot about himself. I find this much too personal for a business website that is trying to attract customers. After finding his portfolio where he links to some of his work I took a look at some of the pages he designed. They are busy and cluttered and some simply don’t work.

I did find one good thing on his website. It’s some interesting statistics. He doesn’t say where he got them so I don’t know if they are accurate, but they are interesting, nonetheless:

A few things you probably didn't know...
40% of users will not return to a site when they have had a negative experience.
79% of users scan a web page.
62% of users do not find what they are looking for on a site.
25% of users read slower online than in print.
Most users spend less than 10 minutes on most web sites.
A user will decide within 20 seconds if they are going to browse past the home page of your web site.

This all just goes to show you, anyone can design a webpage and someone might even pay you to do it. Maybe we can supplement our teaching salary with what we’re learning in this class. Someday we may come back and thank Judy for the newfound knowledge.