Should my website be pretty or functional?
I was in a heated discussion last week about whether a client’s website should be "pretty" or "functional". The designer was pushing hard for a breathtaking site including high-cost photography and appealing to my clients’ emotions with comments like "no one will stay on your site if it isn’t appealing," and "that is a mistake a lot of website owners make" and proceeded to sell the client $15,000 worth of photography. The site looks awesome! Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything. My point, if people can’t find your site, it doesn’t matter how appealing it is. If you are just funding a pretty online slide show – you are not going to be successful online. A website should not just be a pretty page to look it, it should function as part of your existing successful business logic. It is not an answer to a dying business. If you are looking to create a website for a new business, then the business logic must be sound on paper before it will ever work online. The first placement step in obtaining significant web visitor counts is to seek first-page search-engine results. An early step is to build a great content-rich site. One of the last steps is the proper submission of your great site to the search engine or directory. Yet you will not believe how many programmers tell people differently. To prove my point go to Google, Yahoo, or MSN and check out the key word phrase for The Daniel Island News, "Daniel Island", and see if you can find our site. We are always on page one and generally rank in the top three of millions of pages that are indexed for Daniel Island. The interesting thing about The Daniel Island News site is that we specifically designed it not to be "too pretty," limiting the use of Flash (which search engines can’t read) and attempting to make it quick and user-friendly — no delays waiting for neat photography or graphics to load. The Daniel Island News website is functional and each day we work on it to get it more functional. In a few weeks you will be able to order discounted dinner gift certificates if you are resident of Daniel Island and are willing to drive downtown. That is a benefit to our community and it drives traffic to our website. There are no search engine optimization secrets — just ranking and placement methodologies to follow in order to beat your competition in obtaining a high ranking for desired search keywords. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "pretty is as pretty does" and pretty doesn’t do nearly as much as function when it comes to driving traffic to your website. You may contact Pat Bruce at pfbruce@comcast.net.