Dealing with the challenges of designing a website for yourself.
Designing for yourself can be challenging. Why is that? You know what you like and you don’t have anyone to answer to besides yourself. Well it’s different for different people. There are actually a few designers that I know that enjoy designing for themselves. Most designers and even design shops fall into traps that we warn our own clients about.
Here are several pitfalls and ways to get around them.
- Not doing your homework or having a strategy.
This is a sure fire way to fail, if you don’t know what goals you’re trying to achieve then you are most likely not going to reach them. You need to figure out the goals for your site and develop your site around those goals. - Taking the cheap route
Some people try to save money or time buy going with a plug and play template or having their friend’s son build them a web site. IF you really want to get a return on investment, make an investment. Would you want someone to put on a roof on your house for $100? Probably not that’d be scary, same is for web just because you can’t see the difference a professional can and so can your results. No need to spend top dollar but find someone with reasonable rates and be willing to make an investment into your company if you expect others to. - There is no absolute perfect.
Too many people fall for this one; trying to get everything completely perfect before moving to the next stage. Don’t get me wrong you should have the major wrinkles ironed out but no need to be perfect your site can changed. It is not set in stone. You can launch the site and continue to refine and add to it as time goes on.
Tags: site strategy, web design