Since launching their site, turnover at Antonio Pacelli has increased considerably. They have even realised unexpected marketing benefits from their attention to the quality of photography on the site. “We have been asked by a lot of fanzine sites to use them, which has raised our profile a lot”, Gavigan is pleased to report. Overall Antonio Pacelli’s use of design has contributed considerably to the company’s bottom line.

The value of well-considered design is tangible for organisations using the Web for non-retail activity too. “We have always been strong on design”, observes Juliet Tizzard, Director of the infertility information charity the Progress Educational Trust. “The way our organisation presents itself in design terms affects our credibility, and makes us look bigger than we are.”

The poor use of design is costing companies that are using the Web to assist their business dearly. With online retailing particularly this cost becomes quantifiable. According to the New York-based customer experience consultancy Good Experience $19 billion was lost by US companies in online sales during 2000 “as a result of online shopping carts not working or being unusable, poor search, and cluttered home pages”[i].

There is clearly a problem here, but it requires some level-headed thinking from organisations to address.

While the nature of good design is a hotly contested issue a well-designed Web site should bridge the organisation’s goals and resources to deliver a high quality of experience to its target audiences when they are using it for its intended purposes. The reasons there is so much bad design online are numerous.

As a new medium, there is an inevitable learning curve for companies wanting to exploit the Web, and this was the case with graphic and product design in the last century. Having grown up in a technology-infatuated age, design for the Web has been confused and conflated with the process of creating a Web site. Most companies wouldn’t ask a printer to design their corporate identity; neither should they expect a programmer to design their Web site[ii].

While Web design serves a company’s goals in the same ways as other kinds of design, unlike print, the character of the medium dictates that it is very different in its specifics. Unlike two-dimensional print a Web site has a third dimension of depth, created by a hierarchy of pages[iii], a fourth dimension of time (most vividly, and often irritatingly demonstrated by Flash animations), and a fifth dimension of user interaction. Most frustratingly for people familiar with print the appearance of a Web site will vary widely depending on many factors including the operating system and browser on which they are being viewed, and the bandwidth of the speed of the Internet connection over which the pages are delivered.

While there is a lot to learn Web design is not mystical, and the design process has a lot in common with other business processes. (See box ‘Ten tips for managing Web design’.) Web design combines a logical process with lateral thinking and creativity, which itself can be evaluated and tested. Ultimately making sure the design of your Web site is effective and of high quality requires framing and evaluating the design in the context of your overall objectives, and of your audiences and their goals. On a retail Web site a design solution that makes it difficult for a customer to see the range of products, find a specific product, or purchase it is a bad solution.

The value of good design isn’t just in getting people to the checkout. The quality of this experience is also important, as is the overall impression of your organisation that you present, whether you are providing information on IVF or selling dance shoes.

Unless companies can learn to manage Web design effectively they will continue to squander the opportunities the Web offers their business.

Ten tips for managing Web design

1.Ground your project

Design decisions should be framed by the objectives of your Web project. Make sure you are clear about your objectives, and if possible find ways to quantify what it would mean to achieve them.

2.Specify your project thoroughly

To find a designer or design company to work with, you should ideally create a ‘request for proposals’ outlining the project objectives, describing your audiences, and the functions you expect the site to have, including some background on your company and its competitors, and perhaps your budget.

3.Brief your designer well

The best way to work with a designer is to write a design brief. Many of the key aspects of a brief can be addressed in two straight-forward steps. Describe the typical users of your site, what you want them to be able to do, and how they might do it. And review other Web sites (especially your competitors’) and describe which aspects of their designs do and don’t work well. As Vincent Flanders and Michael Willis, creators of Web Pages That Suck[iv], so subtlety put it: “learn good design by looking at bad design”.

4.Plan the project carefully

Planning a project is critical to its success, and it is worth spending a lot of time with your designers early on to work through the stages of the projects and anticipate pitfalls and roadblocks. You should also make time for giving considered feedback on design solutions and for managing the implementation of the design.

5.Review design ideas regularly

There are many aspects to developing a design solution, from mapping the information on the site, to sketching users’ interactions, and visualising the ‘look and feel’. Encourage your designers to present ideas for review regularly, push them to explain their thinking, test out the ideas with typical users, and make sure they don’t get stuck on one idea without trying others first.

6.Bring your users in early and often

The people who will be using your site can be a wonderful reality check. See if you can find a small but representative group who you can bring in to discuss the design brief, and who your designers can visit to see how they work and how they might use your site. Find another representative group (who aren’t familiar with the project) who your designers can work with to test the usability of their designs.

7.Engage your colleagues

Make sure that your colleagues and staff who are directly or indirectly involved in the Web project understand your designer’s approach and encourage them to comment on the design ideas presented.

8.Keep an overview of the project

A Web project can feel very intangible. If you have space in your office dedicate a room or a wall for pinning up design sketches and visuals and other material related to the project. Make sure the design brief is always to hand so that it being addressed in the proposed design solutions.

9.Test your site

When you are happy with the design of your site make sure you or someone in your organisation tries it out on the variety of operating systems, browsers and connection speeds that you expect your audience to be using.

10.Review your success

Launching your site is only the beginning. With your designer you should review the success of your collaboration and, if it was a success, plan the next phase of the design. You will learn a lot about the success of the design from the feedback you get from your users and from the Web ‘logs’ generated by their use of the site. You will also learn a lot from conducting further usability testing.