Is Good Website Design About Pretty Or Functional?

Maybe it’s a side effect of my technical background, but when I think web design, I think pretty, artsy, graphic design, lots of pictures and cool colors. Now while there’s nothing wrong with a website that is all of those things, it would be a mistake to assume that good web design is only about making a site that looks nice. Given that a website is destined to do more then simply be hung on a wall  next to Mona and her contemporaries, a website also needs to be highly functional. Users and visitors need to be able to navigate and use the website in the most intuitive manner possible. It’s not like their going to receive training in how to use the functionality of every site they visit.

Back in the early days of my career as network admin, things were quite a bit different. There was no high speed internet, and the personal computer was still not in every home. So, basically all the work I did was on mainframe and mini mainframes used by business. But, something that was strikingly different with the applications of that day, was the amount of training that went into getting users up to speed on using the system. Application design wasn’t really an intuitive thing back then. People weren’t that familiar with computers, the computers themselves were clunky and every application was a little different. Even the applications we as developers used required us to go on training to use them.

I still remember, the first time training  for a new system going into our department. I think, it was for email, or maybe calendaring. I ran in one of the earliest version of Windows, probably 3.1. Now while they had training courses for it, we were also give the option of just pointing and clicking, and figuring it out for ourselves. Made perfect sense to me. Seems a little strange, when you look back and think about how things used to be done, and how people jump behind software they’ve never used before and start working with it instantly today. Milwaukee web design has several companies that are particularly skilled at producing these kinds of website applications.

A large part of that has to do with the fact that every application under Windows or on a Mac follow similar conventions offered to the developers by the operation system, and development tools. But, also partially because of a higher standard for good application design. Besides designing and building websites, there is a third component known as marketing or promoting of websites. Often called search engine optimization. SEO in Milwaukee, would promote a site to land high in the search engines for terms specific to the city of Milwaukee.