Web Design and What It Does

 
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eb design, like any other type of design, is art that is not quite art. Web design has to be advertising, packaging, and product rolled into one. Building an online store is not web design, nor is creating an advertisement page web design, nor is creating a page that looks incredible but has no text. There is no such thing as web design for web design's sake. A page that only looks pretty is web art, not web design. A page that only markets a product is not a work of web design either: it is web-based marketing.

Will anyone find a page of web art or read a page of web marketing? Only if they are specifically looking for what it contains. The job of web design is to pick up where the invention of hypertext leaves off, by actually creating relevant content in an attractive and intuitive web design. If this task is done right, someone looking for any number of topics related to your specialty will end up looking at your web design, and being satisfied.

Web design is not a work of trickery: that's spam. Proper web design markets itself by being eminently relevant to both search engines and human readers. For web design to be effective, it must essentially be web marketing, web advertising, and plain, common-sense, real useful material all at the same time. One element of this usefulness of web design is web page design, but that is far from being the whole story on web design.

Overestimating the usefulness of the 'store' paradigm is still one of the greatest downfalls of modern design in general, and it is an error that has translated itself into the field of web design in such a way as to make a great percentage of web sites totally useless and irrelevant. Web site design is no more the same as web page design than architecture is the same as interior decorating. Each is an important field in the construction of the total experience. Web design in general must field both of these problems, as well as the completely misunderstood technical fields, web programming and web copywriting.

- Last updated: January 7, 2004
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