Is Web Strategy more important than good Web Design?
Many people in our business talk a lot about the importance of “Web Strategy”. In most cases that means investing in search engine optimization to bring people to your Web site. It’s a sales pitch that’s pretty easy to grasp - if you get more people to your site, in theory you’ll get more sales.
But if your Web site isn’t well designed, all the money spent on Web Strategy will be wasted. You’ll be bringing people over from Google to see… a really-bad-Web-site. People don’t stick around really-bad-Web-sites that are clunky… confusing… hard to use… hijack the Back Button… don’t allow you to bookmark backpages (Flash sites are notorious for this)… Most importantly, people don’t buy stuff from them.
Businesses that invest in search engine optimization but that have a really-bad-Web-site end up like the Boy Who Cried Wolf - they may have the #1 position in Google, but after a while nobody pays attention.
Don’t get me wrong - having a Web Strategy is a great idea - but it’s even more important to make sure you get the Web Design right.
hi, Rob, how are you?
A web strategy is more than just “let’s get traffic” - though some organisations may misuse the term. Really I think a web strategy /is/ more important than web design, as it forms the guidelines for the design itself.
Your web strategy should define the purpose/audience/goals/measures of the website itself & the place of the website in achieving the organisation’s wider goals. Of course, if you’re the only person involved in the website then your strategy may be entirely in your head.
It is possible to start a design process before any strategy has been figured out, but then how do you know what the website is supposed to achieve? how can you make sure you’ve got the right content & - importantly - how can you design the website to put across that content in the best way possible?
daniel
Design and strategy are two different things, and I’m suggesting a perfectly good strategy will fail without thoughtful design.
Design means how something is put together. You wouldn’t build a car w/a joystick instead of a steering wheel, to use an extreme example, because people wouldn’t use it (or it wouldn’t meet safety requirements). The same applies to Web sites.
Strategic goals for design is one thing - understanding design principles and what works and _executing_ is another.