Design
Bye, Bye Dancing Baloney!
Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it’s called in the biz, is responsible for a massive shift in the way many, if not most, sites are created today. In fact, any web developer worth his salts has gone back to school to adapt his or her skills to the new Google world.
While we won’t geek-out by delving into the annals of Cascading Style Sheets or CSS, suffice to say that companies and organizations today are far more aware and demanding where Google and other search engines are concerned and that has led to a new era in design.
Great design still has to accomplish that X-factor. The visitor isn’t sure what makes them feel at ease, but everything just works. There’s a simplicity that belies the hours of sweat to create an aura of “simple".
We like to refer to the early years of our business as the Dancing Baloney years as designers and clients marvelled at how you could animate anything and everything. And while things like the tasteful use of Flash animation still have their place – and lord knows we’ve done our fair share of Flash animation – today, for business, it’s all about getting people where they’re going quickly in an attractive environment that is visible to Google.
It’s not the end of great design – far from it – its function driven design that loses none of the impact of the dancing baloney days and probably looks a heck of a lot more professional!
Beyond the new SEO-friendly skills we’re using today, great design still has to accomplish that X-factor. The visitor isn’t sure what makes them feel at ease, but everything just works. There’s a simplicity that belies the hours of sweat to create that aura of “simple”.
Good design should create an immediate positive impression, direct the eye to the most important message and then to secondary content on a page. It should play a role in the navigation, visually helping guide the visitor on to other content important to them and it should make reading what you’ve written enjoyable.
So good bye dancing baloney, hello results!
