Last week in our post we touched on the troubles of website trends through Dieter Rams’ 7th principle of design: good design is long-lasting. Today we want to really break apart what we think is one of the most important principles drawn out by Mr. Rams. This post is all about principle #8: good design is thorough down to the last detail.
You’re busy, we get it, because we are too! What human being isn’t busy anymore? Just you even taking the time out of your hectic schedule to read this post is astounding and admirable. However the excuse of “busyness” is often ironic because we’ll say “I’m just really busy,” to side step the real reason why we failed at doing something: laziness.
It’s amazing how we can let laziness change the course of how anything goes down. In design laziness is usually the culprit behind shotty final products. But the thing with laziness is it can hide well behind beauty. What we mean is you can put your heart in soul into creating a beautiful website, but at the end if you haven’t ticked all the small boxes (i.e. link checks, optimized images, mobile-friendly design, SEO, etc.) then first off your design isn’t really complete. Secondly, although they are small details, if left unfinished they cause bigger problems.
Thoughts like “it’ll probably work on mobile,” or “that button’s probably linked,” or “that image is a little too big, but it’ll be fine,” are cancers to any website design. And we know they’re a pain and you’re just excited to have your product finished but there’s a deeper reason why being lazy in your final check lists are big no-no. Here’s why:
Your clients pay you to make sure you build them a website that gets them more business. If you’re being lazy in the finite details then you’re not only disrespecting your clients, but allowing your clients to disrespect their customers. You have been given the responsibility of designing something that boosts your client and allows them to meet goals and your laziness can become the catalyst in destroying any possible growth for your client. No big deal right?
It doesn’t have to be as scary as it sounds. A way to make sure your design is a thorough design is by implementing a final checklist. Items on this checklist can include:
- Site wide link checks
- Making sure your images are all optimized
- Double checking that all forms work properly
- Taking the time to SEO all pages, posts and images
These are all things we do at Spark Sites before making a site live on the web. We take the responsibility of making our clients look awesome extremely seriously. We want to see them succeed, we want to see them explode significance and being extremely thorough in our design processes are small, but major steps to help do just that.
So lets not be lazy when it comes to our designs – lets give our clients what they deserve so they can keep growing their businesses! We’re coming close to the end of our series on design! Next week we’ll dive into Dieter Rams’ 9th principle of design: good design is environmentally friendly.
