Seth Godin blogged yesterday on creating a good web site, and today on creating a great web site (and here I vowed not to mention Seth’s blog more than once a week, but it’s too darned good).

Too many designers I have worked with take a very narrow view of what design is: they concentrate on the great colour schemes, great typography, flashy photos and so on, but ignore other aspects of web site design.

Web design originally stemmed from print design, which is pretty much exclusively great colours, typography, etc. The mindset of designers even today is based in print media, while the web is really a brand new beast, and the design must be treated as so.

The role of a web designer - either a single designer or a small team - encompasses several different roles beyond the “look and feel”.

Dave’s Hierarchy for Web Site Design:

1. Information architecture. This is the foundation for the web site; the way the information is organized. Even basic web sites have a lot of information, and without strong organization, the information can become jumbled and incoherent.
2. Navigation design. How we  move around this information is critical to the success of the site, and the complexity of the navigation increases exponentionally with the amont of information or actions within the site. I particularly like Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think book, philosophy and principles.
3. User experience. What kind of experience do you want your users to have when using the site? Peter Morville’s User Experience Honeycomb  lists 7 facets of user experience (click the link to read about the details on these items):
   • Useful
   • Usable
   • Desirable
   • Findable
   • Accessible
   • Credible
   • Valuable
4. Identity and Branding. Your brand is the public perception of your company. Without a good brand identity, you will just be another company out there, not a Pepsi, Nike or Chanel.
5. Look and feel. This is where most designers concentrate because it is what they know and have been trained to do.

(I just realized I have both of Peter Morville’s books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability on my desk, standing beside Don’t Make Me Think)

Seth goes on to explain (my paraphrasing) that web design is not about reinventing the wheel; there are a lot of tried and true techniques and processes to draw upon. While every web site is (or should be) unique to the company, objective or purpose, the web design process is not unique, or even that difficult. With standard processes and systems, web design should not be that difficult.

Are you talking to your user or at your user, or are you just talking to yourself - showing off? The best designs facilitate interacting - talking with your user. How does your design accomplish this?

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