00:0024 октября 200700:00
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00:0024 октября 2007
Almost every start-up requires some kind of a website. For very many beginner entrepreneurs it, unfortunately, becomes a problem 1, or even worse, prevents business from being continued after few feeble attempt to do something.
This
is very often being an end of a business idea. It's, surely, not a reason, but
when you are looking for reasons not to do something interesting, but difficult,
it works! Seth Godin, the author of bestselling marketing books, gives simple
advice to bring down threshold of your start - up failure and save your
brilliant business idea:
For most people, that's all you need. A website
that's good enough. Not that breaks new ground, establishes a new identity,
discovers new ways for people to interact online. Just a good enough website
that didn't kill you to launch.
To be clear, the following advice
assumes that:
You're not trying to reinvent the idea of a web page -
that the page is a means to an end
You work with other people
So,
here's what you do. First, realize that traditionally, the job of designer has
been linked with the job of programmer. There were very good reasons for this.
Designing a page that can't work is silly, and changing the design every time
you change the way the page works can be time consuming and expensive.
As
a result, web design became a sacred art, one done only by the blessed few, in
caverns far away from where mortals tread. In addition, it became expensive,
because design changes (which marketers love to make) got in the same queue as
programming changes.
On yours marks!
We need to start by divorcing
the two practices. There's no longer a really good reason for the two to be so
closely linked, especially since disciplined use of CSS and testing pays such
dividends.
Start with design. Don't involve the programming team until
you're 90% done with the look and feel of your pages. It's cheap to change
design if it can't by supported by programming, and cheaper and faster to have
design done in Photoshop before you commit to cutting it up and coding
it.
I'm going to go out on a limb and beg you not to create an original
design. There are more than a billion pages on the web. Surely there's one that
you can start with? If your organization can't find a website that you all
agree can serve as a model, you need to stop right now and find a new
job.
Not a site to rip - off, but an inspiration. Fonts and colors and
layout. The line spacing. The interactions. Why not? Your car isn't unique, and
your house might not be either. If you've got a site that sells 42 kinds of
wrapping paper, why not start by finding a successful site that sells... I
don't know, shoes or yo - yo's... something that both appeals to your target
audience and has been tested and tweaked and works. No, don't pick a
competitor. That will get you busted. Pick a reasonably small but successful
site in a totally different line of work. Say to your designer: "That's our
starting point. Don't change any important design element without asking me
first. Now, pull in our products, our logo and our company color scheme and
let's take a look at it."
At this point, some people are aghast!
Shouldn't the web be a design contest on top of everything else? I don't think
so.
Now, take your finished Photoshop pages and get every single person
who can possibly veto your project to say okay. Then give it to engineering to
make it work.
[Boy, am I in trouble. People hate posts like this one.
They read all sorts of things into it that I don't intend. I'm certainly not
against bespoke design, or designers. I certainly don't believe that all
engineers are bad designers or even difficult to deal with. The point of the
post is most definitely not to encourage you to commit copyright violations or
even ethical ones. It merely works to recognize two things:
1. If you are
unable to agree on an existing site, you are sure going to spend a lot of time
and money trying to agree on a custom one.
2. The process of design and
user interaction is best done separately from the process of server speed,
database structure and uptime.
Forgive me! ]
P. S. The author's
spelling and punctuation are preserved in the text.
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Information from the
Internet
-http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/how-to-create-a.html
Next
time (November 7) - I'm going to tell how speaking becomes a business tool.