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Custom Website Design - The Graphics
Category: InternetI have argued that a custom website should be designed to represent your specific business. Every aspect of its form and function should be intended to achieve a certain result, and every result achieved should be valuable for your company. The graphics are no exception to this rule. The advantage of custom graphics lies in both visual appeal and site function. Consider how both a custom and mundane website might be expected to use graphics.
First, consider simple visual appeal. You may have noticed in recent web searches that sites largely fall into one of three categories. First, you have the mundane. Black text. White background. Tabbed browsing. Maybe a couple images off to the side, splashes of color. These sites favor a clean, professional look and rapid loading time, which is all well and good. They work just fine for big businesses especially, who have a lot of customers who want to go to their site and handle their business with little delay or distraction. They serve their purpose, but that is not the goal of the small business. A small business needs to gather customers, build brand recognition, acquire referrals. Mundane sites are not designed to fulfill these goals.
Then you have template layouts. These sites have more color, nicer images, maybe some Flash. They’re much more visually impressive, and thus suit a small business better. At the very least, visitors will be more impressed by the graphics. However, the key goal of the small business, building brand recognition, is absent. Templates cannot be used for brand recognition, because they were not created with a specific brand in mind. They were created to be used by any of a variety of businesses in a given field. Pictures of people, appealing color schemes and layout designs, make the site more interesting and colorful. This is good; it isn’t enough.
Finally, you have the ones that go beyond the norm. They play with the standards, relying on specially made graphics that gives their businesses an immediate personality. The graphics are not only visually impressive, just like those from a template, but they are unique to the business. They can be replicated as necessary for the business (here’s a tip: make sure you have the rights to graphics created for your site). Business cards, t-shirts, posters, flyers, even billboards can all make use of the same layout. It’s not just a logo, it is a theme for your business, visual copy that you can use to establish your brand.
Aside from appearance, there is functionality to consider. Again, consider first the mundane and template sites. Mundane sites are meant to be clean and purely practical, using the traditional, expected forms. Banner goes here, links go here, text goes here, and so on. Likewise with templates; they have specific places to put text and graphics, all pre-designed, considered on the basis of overall merit. And, in the general sense, yes; these forms are practical and effective. No doubt, there are a good many websites that can benefit from using them.
The question is, will yours? I’m not saying to be different for the sake of being different; I’m saying to be different if being different will benefit you. You can use your graphics to draw attention to certain parts of the site, using colors and contrasts to highlight important links or attract the eye to your critical text.
The goal of custom website design is that your site should be built around your business. It should communicate your brand, it should attract the customer’s attention. Graphics are the key. By creating unique images for your site, you can visually communicate the most critical points as your business beginning the instant that the home page loads.
Copyright © 2007 Dustin Schwerman.
Dustin Schwerman is the primary web designer at Truly Unique–Affordable Custom Website Design. Truly Unique specializes in impressive, custom sites designed to capture the essence of the businesses they represent, as well as creating useful web-based programs to improve and simplify some of the tasks of running a business. Their goal is to provide these services at affordable, pragmatic rates based on effort involved, rather than arbitrary costs based on number of pages or hours.