Why Designers Matter

A friend of mine that does SEO locally in Orange County called an article on Blumenthals to my attention, but I didn’t read any of the post. The sloppiness of the design on a Mac went beyond unprofessional. I was looking at it in Safari, so to be fair I pulled up the site in Firefox and then in Google Chrome. It looked just as bad in those two browsers. 

Your average person surfing the web would have stopped at Safari, but I do craft web sites so I always dig deeper when I find a site like this.  I fired up my emulator and took a look at the site in Internet Explorer 9 under Windows 7. The site looked fine.

Well, here’s a dinosaur, I thought.  Someone who only designs for Internet Explorer on the desktop; meanwhile the web is down at Starbucks on smart phones of various sizes and makes. So I decided to see who this Blumenthal chap was. Turns out he runs a hosting service and offers web design on the side.  And I thought “Oh, one of those guys.”  

There’s a very simple truth about the Web. No one can do it all. Seriously. Things change too often too quickly. So if someone is good at something like SEO, they are not going to be good at web design. Clearly, at Blumentals, design comes last.

From The Mailbox To The Trash

Here’s what you need to think about: Design must come first. How long is someone going to stay on your site? Well that all depends on the quality of the content. How long do you have to convince someone that your site has quality content? You have the time it takes them to walk from the mailbox to the trash. That’s not long at all.  I tend to carry in the mail and then I stand over the trash and sort the mail. Design must come first. Your site should smell like freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. 

Do yourself a huge favor and hire a designer. Someone who just does design.