Don’t make your designer work in a vacuum. (pt 2)

– Robert Kruger 30 April 2010

As I mentioned yesterday, the success of a web design can be limited by a lack of understanding about technology. The design affects what everyone else on the interactive team can do. A good design is more than pretty pictures. It is ALSO a user interface that can free developers to add powerful functionality that directly impacts the site owner’s profitability. That “also” is important. A good website design is both aesthetic and functional.

The point is: the designer shouldn’t be expected to know everything. The designer’s strength comes from working through a list of necessities and coming up with an engaging presentation. The designer is not the right person to write that list of business and marketing priorities.

I’m going to share some real-life experiences where the designer was left to make their own decisions about website functionality and usability. It’s not important to know the project details to understand what went wrong. These examples are all SEO issues I have seen, but I could also have listed examples where the designer was left in the dark about information architecture or URL structure and deep linking or dynamically repurposed content or site personalization or browser-specific usability limitations.

• Headline Usage: I have seen designs where a page layout has no headlines. I have seen multiple headlines. Google wants to see one “h1” tagged headline. If the content seems to need two, split the content into two pages. That’s OK - Google likes more pages. I have heard numerous designers ask the same thing: “Does it matter how many headlines there are on a page?” Yes, it matters, but what really matters is the designer asked the question. When the developer is handed a design and is told to shut up and implement, the resulting site will be weaker than if they are allowed input.
• The Flash Intro (circa 1997): The idea behind a Flash intro is to play an animated commercial that precedes all other web content. The idea was a good one back when site visitors had slow connection speeds and limited browsing capabilities. It made a cool first impression for a site that had very little coolness anywhere else. It also worked because search engines were prioritizing content differently in the early days of internet popularity than they do today. The Flash intro isn’t dead yet. I still see them on occasion. We vaccinate against them - like swine flu - whenever we are given the chance. Google wants the purpose of a site to be clearly written up on the home page, and the first page that comes up on a website is what Google says is home, even if you prefer to call it an intro that precedes the “real” home page.
• Frequently Updated Content: Designers ask me (with surprising frequency) why a content management systems is needed at all. The question itself is telling; hearing the question frequently is surprising. Google equates relevancy to change. Website copy needs to be different every time Google comes back to re-index a website’s content - commonly every 3-7 days. Seriously, for a website to be successful, some part of the copy needs to be re-written once or twice every week. The website designer who recommends a hard-coded HTML site or a Flash-only site is heading toward failure. Someone non-technical will likely be responsible for keeping Google happy by frequently tweaking the copy. They may be a professional copywriter or marketer, or they may be a staffer with the site owner. It’s unlikely that they will be a skilled Flash or Dreamweaver user.
• Google Skepticism: I commonly have to defend Google to designers (and site owners and developers, by the way). “Why should Google have authority over what we do?” It’s simply the way it is. Google IS the authority. People use Google to find stuff on the web. Google studies human behavior. Google writes its prioritization algorithm to emulate real human behavior. Whenever I say that Google likes something, it also means that real human web surfers like that same something. Don’t fight it. If you can make Google happy, you are also making site visitors happy, and that’s what’s really important.

In all of these examples, failure would have been inevitable if the designer had continued to work in a vacuum, without the input of other experts.

The designer isn’t at fault. Neither is the customer or the developer or the marketer. Without a collaborative process, each person can do their job to the best of their ability, and the resulting product will be ineffective. By working together to fix these issues, no one fails.

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