Web design WOES, function needs come before form, beautiful and fancylooking

 
In the era of ai-enhanced design, experts caution that businesses often prioritise beauty over functionality, resulting in stunning websites that don’t drive sales.

Why Your Pretty New Homepage Is Probably a Waste of ...

Why Your Pretty New Homepage Is Probably a Waste of Money 

A pair of web design experts with decades of experience between them explain why most homepage redesigns fail miserably, especially now. 

Say you’re searching the web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling? 

Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years. 

Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently. 

He and other experts insist that it’s the latest AI-fueled version of a problem as old as the web — business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.  :42 

Wasting money on fancy homepages is an internet tradition

Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like SurveyMonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.

Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups — it can crash them.” 

The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their mind about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle. 

But also, when companies redesign their website they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancy-looking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational,” and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase. 

Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says. 

Why the problem is worse now 

All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends. 

Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritizing good looks over results. 

“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”

The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favor of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth. 

“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz. 

He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. If you’re actively thinking about revamping your website, I’d recommend you take time to read his whole analysis. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning. 

Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive — it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment. 

But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. 

SAY you’re searching the Web one day and you come across a truly beautiful website. The image is striking, the copy inspirational, the design meticulous. You could frame the thing and hang it above your couch. Are you likely to click and buy whatever that page is selling?

Not according to veteran designer and author Michal Malewicz, who has been designing websites for companies large and small for more than 20 years.

Thanks to an explosion of image generators and other fancy new tools, the Web has recently become chock-full of extremely pretty websites that do a terrible job of actually selling anything, he argued on Medium recently.

He and other experts insist that it’s the latest Ai-fuelled version of a problem as old as the Web – business owners wasting tremendous amounts of money on ineffective but beautiful websites. And any entrepreneur who actually wants to make money should be warned.

The tradition of fancy homepages

Bad homepages are, of course, nothing new. Elena Verna, a startup veteran who worked in growth roles at companies like Surveymonkey and Dropbox for 15 years before becoming an entrepreneur herself, has written about this problem in her newsletter, Elena’s Growth Scoop.

Over the course of her career, she has seen more than her fair share of failed homepage redesigns. “What usually happens?” writes Verna. “A multi-month effort ensues, involving everyone and their mother’s opinions, and the result often doesn’t fail to lift sign-ups – it can crash them.”

The problem, she explains, is two-fold. One, many potential customers make up their minds about a purchase long before they go Googling homepages, meaning the expense and effort of these huge redesign projects often fails to move any meaningful needle.

But also, when companies redesign their websites, they generally want to make them more beautiful and fancylooking. Verna’s word for this is “aspirational”, and she claims it rarely works out. Nice-looking words and images usually just end up confusing those looking to make a purchase.

Across the many, many redesigns Verna has encountered, “I’ve never seen one that had a major positive impact,” she says.

Why the problem is worse now

All of which is a long-winded way to confirm that businesses have been wasting money on bad homepage designs basically since there were homepages to design. But according to Malewicz’s detailed Medium post, the problem is more acute these days for two reasons: technology and design trends.

Like Verna, he too has observed that business owners have long fallen into the trap of prioritising good looks over results.

“When making websites for clients, we may think they want to get as many sales as possible. After 25 years of doing that, I can assure you it’s mostly not the case,” he writes. “Regular people treat design as close to art. They want a pretty painting on their domain most of the time.”

The job of the designer is, in part, to talk them out of “just pretty” in favour of effective and pretty. But recently, many designers have been seduced by a new rage for artistic, inspirational, and animated homepages and forgotten this basic truth.

“Currently we see a trend of pretty images merged with mediocre UI exploding on social media,” cautions Malewicz.

He signals out a few particular examples for constructive criticism in his post. But the bottom line for business owners is a simple warning.

Devoting a lot of time and money to creating a more eye-catching website has always been seductive – it seems like such a straightforward way to grow your business. And it’s even more seductive with all the fancy new tools designers have to play with at the moment.

But if you care about results more than artistic merit, it’s also almost sure to disappoint. Pretty is nice, but function needs to come before form. – Inc./tribune News Service

Related:

2024 World Science and Technology Development Forum to be held in Beijing, gathering global wisdom to address sustainable devt challenges

More 100 scientists from China and abroad, including Nobel Prize laureates, officials, and representatives from the United Nations and other international organizations, will convene in Beijing for home academic event the 2024 World Science and Technology Development Forum (WSTDF) from October 22 to 24. They are anticipated to engage in ...

Bloggers doing their bit to champion a good cause

BLOGGER Dr Angelo Nino M. Santos brought his eight-year-old son to visit three children’s homes so that the little boy would appreciate what he had in his life.



“My son Antonio Gabriel was so excited to come.

“He packed his old toys and clothes to be donated to the children here,” he said while at Ramakrishna Orphanage in Scotland Road, Penang.

The visit was in conjunction with the ‘Responsible Blogging 2013: Time To Give Back’ programme.

A total of 40 bloggers visited Rama-krishna Orphanage, Children’s Pro- tection Society and Shan Children’s Home to give away food and other items.

The programme was organised by Crowdpot Sdn Bhd, a social media marketing company.

Crowdpot director Leslie Loh said they planned to help educate bloggers about safe blogging and to achieve one million ‘responsible actions’.

“For example, if each blogger who posted about this event in his or her blog receives about 100 comments, we consider that we have generated responsible action,” he explained.

Dr Angelo, 36, a lecturer at the Allianze University College of Medical Sciences, said it was the first time he was taking part in such a programme.

He said he started blogging in 2007 and his blog mainly focuses on the 3Fs — family, food and fun.

Also present was Penang Health, Welfare, Caring Society and Environ­ment Committee chairman Phee Boon Poh.

Loh said Crowdpot was also giving away prizes for those who helped to blog about the homes.

“The prizes include three iPad Minis sponsored by Crowdpot and six Ninetology Black Pearl 2 dual-core Android smartphones sponsored by Ninetology Malaysia,” he said.

The contest is until March 23.

For details, visit www.responsibleblogging.my. - The Star

 Related post:

Rightways: Food for blog

Food for blog

Whenever we attend an event, there is live tweeting, live blogging, Facebook updates and we ask questions that our readers pose to us.

 

DO YOU remember Doogie Howser, MD, an American television comedy-drama starring Neil Patrick Harris as a teenage doctor?

If you were a child in the 1980s, you could not have missed it. Howser kept a diary on his computer and the episodes ended with him making an entry in the diary. That was possibly our first introduction to what is now known as web log or blog.

According to Merriam Webster’s Dictionary a blog is a website that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

Blogs have become tremendously popular among Malaysians as they look for an alternative source of information to supplement what is being reported in mainstream media.

By the end of last year, marketing research company NM Incite tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006.

So how big is blogging? NM Incite says three out of the top 10 social networking sites in the United States — Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr — are for consumer-generated blogs.

Blogger is the largest of these sites with more than 46 million unique US visitors during October 2011, making it second only to Facebook in the social networking category, and Tumblr was the fastest-growing social networking or blog site on the top 10, more than doubling its audience since last year from home and work computers to 14 million unique visitors.

Overall, these three blogging websites combined for 80 million unique visitors, reaching more than one in every four active online users in the US during October 2011.

And who are these bloggers and what else do they do online? A study by NM Incite indicates that women make up the majority of bloggers, and half of bloggers are aged 18 to 34.

Most bloggers are well-educated: seven out of 10 bloggers have gone to college, a majority of whom are graduates and about one in three bloggers are mothers, and 52% are parents with children under 18 in their household.

Yang: Blogging with passion will eventually allow you to do it full time.

Besides this, bloggers are active across social media: they’re twice as likely to post/comment on consumer-generated video sites like YouTube, and nearly three times more likely to post in message boards/forums within a month.

According to Nuffnang, Asia-Pacific’s first blog advertising community, bloggers generate income through ads placed on blogs by various brands, and become part of a close-knit community through a vast range of exclusive events and contests.

“In Malaysia, blogging started growing exponentially in 2007 when Malaysians started seeing its commercial viability,” said Nuffnang co-founder Timothy Tiah.

Nuffnang has approximately 250,000 bloggers on its books and Tiah revealed that almost 50% of them are active.

“In the US, some bloggers have successfully evolved into full-fledged media companies that employ full-time writers and editors,” said Tiah who believes blogs and traditional media can co-exist.

“Clients do not view blogs as an alternative to traditional media. We are benchmarked against Twitter and Facebook.

For example, having an editorial piece in the New York Times supersedes one by an online publication,” Tiah explained.

Local blogging heroes such as Paul Tan and Vernon Chan, and Singaporean Dawn Yang agree that blogging with passion will eventually enable one to do it full time.

Chan said his site (vernonchan.com) was born out of the love for technology.

“I enjoyed writing but in 2009, I decided to take it more seriously and focused my writing on gadgets and tech-related news,” said the former graphic designer.

“The blog now operates as a tech website with four writers on board.

“The tech scene is fragmented with plenty of players, but it’s healthy competition.

“I look up to sites like amanz.my and soyacincau.com as they were pioneers in this field,” he added.

Chan said that to remain competitive, a blogger needs to focus on speed, frequency and being current.

“Whenever we attend an event, there’s live tweeting, live blogging, Facebook updates and we ask questions that our readers pose to us,” said Chan.

He walks around with a tablet, two smartphones, a laptop, a DSLR camera and is always connected with his readers thanks to U Mobile broadband.

Tan echoed Chan comments and added that an honest blogger serves the reader and not the advertiser.

“We have gotten ourselves in trouble with a particular company a few times as they were not happy with some of the comments from the readers that were published on the website.

“They stopped inviting us for test drives and events for a while, but we serve our readers, and readership is currency, ” said Tan, the founder of paultan.org, a leading motoring website in Malaysia.

Tan also debunked the myth that people will read any content as long as its free online.

“Online readers are looking for something fast so it is important to be quick.

“We do live updates and we have trained our readership,” said Tan, whose company now owns popular Malay blog site, Ohbulan.com among others.

Tan did not mince his words when asked to comment about bloggers who only write advertorials.

“There are bloggers who only attend events if they are paid and will only write a blog posting if there’s a monetary exchange,” he said.

Across the causeway, controversial fashion and lifestyle blogger Dawn Yang (clapbangkiss.xanga.com/) was in Kuala Lumpur recently to attend an event and the 27-year-old told MetroBiz that she started blogging to keep in touch with her friends.

“It started by accident but in 2005, I won an online competition as Singapore’s hottest blogger. That opened many doors for me,” said Yang who was sent to Taiwan for a year to be an artist.

She also secured several endorsement deals from international brands to promote their brands on various platforms.

“Blogging has evolved over the years with Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We can’t just operate on one platform,” said Yang.

Blogging in Malaysia is seen as an easy way to make a quick buck, but to quote blogging guru Alister Cameron: “As I have repeatedly written in one form or other, blogging is not about writing posts. Heck, that’s the least of your challenges. No, blogging is about cultivating beneficial relationships with an ever-growing online readership, and that’s hard work.”

By Nevash Nair