The Easiest Way to Legitimize Your Site

It’s happened to all of us before.

We’re surfing around our favorite sites, reading up on the latest (coughFuelcough) articles, and maybe even Stumbling, Digging, or linking out from Tweetdeck, when all of a sudden we land on a site and immediately hold onto something nearby to keep from keeling over in agony. How can someone put something so horrifying up on the web?

We can come to expect out-of-date, un-styled pages around the web from people who don’t know any better, or haven’t touched their site in five years. But what about people who claim to be professionals in their fields, especially when their field is interface design or web development?

As we said in a previous post, people form an opinion about your site within the first few seconds of seeing it. This is before they get to see who your clients are, what your mission statement is, or even what your name is. With this being said, the easiest way to legitimize your site is to make it look great. And we don’t mean just putting in a few hover effects and a pretty picture or two. We are talking about up-front beauty; take the time to make your website immediately and unforgettably beautiful, and you will see the rewards. Any good business knows that they should trust and use their own product; if you create a less-than-amazing looking site for yourself, your potential customers will naturally expect the same quality to be given to them.

Okay, enough of the concept… how can you go about actually getting this done? There are generally two options to choose between.

Do it Yourself

This is probably the most chosen option, simply because most designers have some kind of base knowledge about coding and design principles. There are many different ways information is presented and styled on the web; the most popular way is CSS, or cascading style sheets. CSS works with HTML markup and styles it according to what you have declared in your CSS file. It is a very powerful way to “beautify” your site. Along with CSS, it would probably be beneficial to learn some JavaScript or jQuery. These languages will help make your sites more interactive, and the quality of your interface will increase greatly from a well thought-out implementation of them. Although not as effective or cross-media friendly, Flash is also a very popular platform on which to build a great looking website. Many times, all of the above methods will be used to create a website.

Hire Someone Else

Let’s face it; not every interface creator is incredibly gifted with coding ability. You know your way around Illustrator and Photoshop all day long, but when it comes to taking your interface to the web, you’re without a map. In fact, this may even be the reason your site would fall into the pit of un-styled ugliness that we are trying to avoid. But there are some great coders out there who can efficiently take that un-styled ugliness and turn it into a beautiful work of art. If you are more of a problem solver or designer than you are a coding genius, this option is probably your most cost-effective best bet.

Conclusion

As always, it is very important that you seek the help of others in the process of interface design. There are no hard, fast “rules”, but there are definitely best practices. While your opinion may be the most important when it comes to making your own site, it isn’t the only opinion that exists. Remember, there is more to it than the way you think it looks. Employ the concepts of design, and remember the practices such as were mentioned in earlier posts on FYI (like this one, this one, and this one).