Compelling Marketing Communications

Does Your Web Designer Talk To Your Graphic Designer?

In our last issue, we discussed some of the functional errors that make a web page ineffective at communicating with your customers. The bottom line on all those errors is that your website user gives you a very short window to show them you can fix whatever problem brought them to your site in the first place.

We must also remember that the web is a visual medium as well. Graphics are an indispensible part of any web site design. Unfortunately, in many places whatever initial specs are created for the site are handed separately to graphic designers and web designers, who go off and complete their parts of the site without talking to each other. How do we know that's what happens? Look at enough web sites and it becomes fairly obvious. One favorite example is the web site for an architecture firm that featured an image of their award-winning building which was covered by flash-based pop-up navigation menus.

That type of obvious blunder does not affect many sites, but there are others that are much more common. One of the most common is when web designers choose a font color that has insufficient contrast to be seen against the background selected by the artists. Another is use of backgrounds that are distracting or obscure the page content.

When your artists and programmers are communicating, however, the graphic elements and the programming elements are combined into a whole. The best result is a web site where you don't merely see the absence of obvious cracks in the design (like obscuring the building), but you don't even notice how these elements are working together. Integrated web design like this gives credibility to the site and the company behind it.

Because we at the Big Dogs of Marketing are an integrated team, our design and content experts are in close communication, which avoids these kinds of errors. Web design as part of a communications strategy will be the topic of our next newsletter, which comes out the third Tuesday of every month. We'll see you on June 15th.

(860) 604-5573 | Bill@CompellingMarketingCommunications.com

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