Web Design Is Dead: Long Live Web Design
“Yeah I’m a web designer”
That response to a question about your chosen career path used to lead people to think that you live in your parent’s basement, wore square glasses taped together, wore your trousers too high, were bad with girls and were generally a massive nerd.
Oh how times have changed (for some). As has the role of the web designer.
Web design is more than just coding a website, web design is now just a tool in a larger process. More and more is being included in the sphere of web design as the need for conversion on the web is becoming more and more important. Investment in advertising on the web recently overtook advertising on TV for the first time which means that we need to design the user experience rather than design a ‘website’.
During the process of this ‘experience design’, there are many more aspects that are involved than just a website.
You may be designing an entire campaign centred around a site or it may just be that you are AB testing two or three or even five designs for improved conversion. How does a user move through the site. Which pages are they landing on when they reach your site? Which PPC leads them to which section? There is a huge role for analytics on websites to try and determine all of these factors and design / test new ways to increase the number of users reaching an intended goal. More often than not meaning parting with some dosh.
Then there is SEO to consider, something I am learning at the moment. Things like URL structure, alt text, anchor text and conomical URLs can have an effect on the keywords your site is found with. There is a large market for optimising websites for search, and as search engines get better – so too must the way we optimise for them to maintain hight ranking.
One of the most recent and yet important inclusions is that of social media campaigns into the design.
Use of sites such as Facebook and Twitter to promote a brand also promotes brand awareness and gives the market an opportunity to have direct communication on an open platform. This means valuable customer feedback (positive and negative) can be obtained at no extra cost.
The added benefit of social media inclusion is in the realm of search. If you search for a brand on Google you get a list of results related to that brand, but some may be negative from people bitching on forums etc. The more social media sites you have such as Twitter or Facebook push those negative results down and even onto the second results page (and who looks there?).
So the whole process can be done by one person but really you need an entire office of ‘web designers’ each with their own focus in design.
So am I a web designer? Yes… but really I am an experience designer with a specific focus.
Good post. I’m going the other way right now – I’m an SEO learning Design. Many designers out there don’t really value SEO and believe all you require is unique content to get top rankings and links. Although there’s an argument to be made for this approach what’s your belief? You seem pretty unbiased on the matter. If you’re not familiar with the debate Google Derek Powazek and you’ll see just how heated it can be.
Hi Matt, thanks for reading.
There is a lot to be said for having unique content. At work we have a dedicated team that optimise the client’s content for their site to make sure that the right keywords are mentioned and that the anchor text on links are correctly formatted to give the best possible outcome. However I don’t believe that unique content alone can get you high rankings. It is a combination of inbound links, and the sources of those links as well as having a correctly designed site using H1 tags and accessible menus for Google to crawl.
Everyone has their own special little ways of increasing traffic to their site and appearing higher on SERPs but the fact that there are so many variations means there isn’t a one-size-fits-all SEO tactic. Each campaign is tailored to the client and their desired outcome.
As a designer I have to embrace this but most of the SEO work is done outside of my sphere of influence. I design for conversion when people reach the site (whether that be monetary or downloads etc.) and most of the rankings work is done by a different team.
To put it into perspective though, I recently did a little SEO work on my own site and now when you Google my name ‘Craig Dennis’ my site appears first whereas before it appeared 5th or 6th.
So I think there is a symbiosis between design and SEO.
Good luck with your design progress.