3.02 Using a web designer

Your business
You can't just wave your chequebook at a web design company and expect a fully functional web site to fit and forget. This is your business you are promoting. You understand how it works and how it relates to your clients. You need to be fully involved in the development of your site and you need to maintain a monitoring role to check that your practice is gaining the expected benefits.

Content content content
Your clients, potential or existing, don't come to your site to admire the quality of the graphics or the layout of your pages. They come for the content. They come for information about your practice, products and services. The design of your practice web site should be driven by the presentation of relevant, quality content and not by other
factors.

Commissioning a designer
When you commission a web design company to create your web site it is all too easy to lose the focus on content. The resulting site is generally less effective, less flexible and often more expensive. At the moment that a web design company is commissioned, quality content is rarely sitting neatly filed in the practice office. Quality content is time consuming to create. The web design company will be pressing for the delivery of content so that they can get on with their part of the process. The temptation is to quickly produce enough content for the web design company to get going - minimum number of words and poor or no graphics.

From a designers point of view
Now to look at the problem from the web designers' point of view. They're on a deadline. They want to produce a site that looks good. They want to get paid. They want you to recommend them to other practices. They don't have enough copy to fill the pages. They don't have enough graphic material from your practice to make that the visual focus. The web design company has little choice but to create a page with a strong visual focus on the graphics they create and reduced space allocation for the abbreviated copy you provide for the sake of speed.

The effect
The final web site the practice signs off in this situation is generally visually attractive and displays the limited practice copy to best advantage. It will actually look like a “proper” web site because this is a universal problem and doesn't just apply to vets. Later, if you should actually get round to extending your copy, you will find that the visual focus on the designer produced graphics and the reduced page area available makes it less effective. Really, you should start again, but after spending all that money ....

The Moral?
Before commissioning a design company, develop the content. Both text and graphics. Creating and linking basic web pages is easy - it can be done in most word processors nowadays - and it is a good test of the content.
If it works as a basic text based site then your content is good. The typographic and graphic skills of a web design company can then be employed to lift the site and present the material to best advantage.

Minimalism
If you start by creating your content as text then you are unlikely to end up with a site crowded with superfluous graphics. Instead of adding design elements in order to fill the page you only add them when they enhance the presentation of your content.

Agoraphobia
Don't be frightened of open spaces on your web site. Whitespace – called that even when it is puce or purple – is the name given to areas without text or images. Used intelligently whitespace will frame and present your content, lifting it from the page.

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