Vancouver Website Designs & The Importance of Fresh Contact to Attract & Keep Visitors
Posted by: Patrick on 10/2/2009 7:42:50 PM
Recently a friend of mine asked me for some free advice. His company was considering making a new website and he wanted to get prepared for what he needed to tell his boss which would be an explanation about what goes into constructing a website in the year of 2009. So he asked me for descriptions of things like SEO, social media, web 2.0, engagement, user participation and retention and so on. I did my best to explain the lay of the landscape and try to explain it in practical terms what each facet did for the overall picture. After about an hour of getting his head stuffed with data, my friend then asked the big question: so, what's the most important part of designing your website? And that's where his expectations hit a big speed bump.
In the early days of the web (back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth in the year 1995), having cool graphics was enough to get attention on the web. I remember picking up a box copy of Netscape and looking at the back cover which showed three screenshots of websites that you could visit once you were hooked up to the net (and of course, browing with Netscape.) All three examples were of graphically rich sites. I can even remember that two of the sites had less than five words on them.
Once enough people had gotten online things started to change. The phrase "content is king" was said by someone, with the philosophy that it's what you write that's more important than the pretty pictures you can see on your screen. But then in the early part of this decade the mantra changed again to web 2.0 and the buzz phrase "engagement of users" started to be heard. By 2004 a strange sounding word called "blog" began to be heard. Suddenly blogging was in vogue followed quickly by podcasting and then viral video. These days the latest trend to namedrop contains two words: social networking. Still, it looks like we haven't built up the courage to say whether one "tweets" or "twatted" when one uses Twitter.
Getting back to my friend's question, when you design a website today every part of it is equally as important as another part. It's like asking the question, "What part of your house is the most important, the concrete foundation, the wood roof over your head or the walls surrounding you?" All of them go into the construction of a home that you live in including your choice of creature comforts like what shade of paint you'd like to have on your walls, what kind of the light fixtures you want to be looking at over your dinner table, whether you have room for a dishwasher, a fireplace and so on. That's how I painted the picture of designing a website circa late 2009 but the most important part was making sure that it all benefited the person that spent the most time inside the house. A well-built house with the latest technology is great but without a person to engage with, it's just an empty shell.
The same holds true for your website. Are you talking to your visitors? Is your website an interesting place to visit? Are there other interesting people there to learn fresh ideas from or share stories? Are you writing fresh content so that today's visitor wants to come back and be tomorrow's returning visitor? Some of the world's most successful websites today -- both corporate as well as entertainment -- are those that think about constructing an online presence where people can come and engage with their host and other visitors. Creating fresh, new content is a major part of these sites and it should be for yours too.
In the end I think my friend got a better view of website design as being a multifaceted process and not just about how pretty a site can look. And hey, I got a free dinner out of it and a night of good conversation at my friend's home. Today's website designers may have figured out how to build better websites but so far no one's figured out how to send you a steak and baked potato dinner through your browser. However, we're working on a solution to that problem to be implemented in third quarter of 2010. Stay tuned for updates!
