Sausage or Sizzle?
Your customers visit your site with specific aims in mind. You need to know what these aims are: this is the foundation of effective design.
One thing your customer is NOT looking for is an artistic experience (unless you're an artist, of course). What they want is to be able to achieve their aim as quickly and efficiently as possible. What YOU want is to be able to fulfil that need and begin a profitable relationship with them.
We strongly believe in the importance of sausage over sizzle. "Sizzle" sites are those that have been created by someone with a graphic design background but no understanding of business. These sites often look wonderful but, like candy floss, turn out to be insubstantial and not nourishing. Visitors to sites such as this end up frustrated and build up a subconscious distrust of all similar sites.
Look at it this way. These are the top ten most visited websites in the UK (excluding search engines) according to Alexa.com:
| YouTube | ||
| Ebay | BBC | |
| Myspace | Bebo | |
| Wikipedia | Amazon | |
| Blogger.com | The Internet Movie Database |
..I only excluded search engines because everyone knows they look awful!
Take a look at the designs: you'll notice that they are, at best, "functional". None would win a design award and yet they account for the vast bulk of all internet traffic (and profits) in the UK.
This is the role of design:
- to establish your credibility. This means that the site must look business-like and substantial. It must look as though it's crammed full of useful information. It must look as though the visitor has come to exactly the right place.
- to help convert visitors into prospects, donors or buyers.
Design is there to support the aim of your website which is to increase your company's income.
