Archive for December, 2008

A shameful website in expatriate Spain

Sunday, December 21st, 2008

DesignOne of the main reasons why I started this blog is that I was appalled by the standard of Web site design in expatriate Spain.

Of course, most of them were property sites and rental sites, cashing in on a temporary boom. If visitors were looking for something definite, they could cope with the most amateurish of sites.

The property boom is over, especially for British expatriates, with the pound approaching parity with the euro. We really need to move on from sites built from templates, and sites built by teenagers in love with Flash.

So why do we have sites as fundamentally dreadful as the site for the “Iceland” shops in expatriate Spain?

The shop is fine
I shop frequently at my local “Iceland”, in Benissa. It is a fine shop, with produce shipped in every day from Britain. It has a fantastic English butcher, a serious range of frozen ready meals, and bottled real ale, like Hobgoblin and Bishops Finger. So I have nothing whatsoever against the company.

The site is shameful
It’s just their Web site which is so awful. If you have ever read a post in this blog, you will know that Web site design begins with thinking about visitors. It is an extension of researched marketing. It is not about the scenery.

Before they take it down, have a look at their page which tells you where their shops are.

What does any visitor want from such a page, at a bare minimum? Opening hours would be good. I can’t find them anywhere on the site. Next, a visitor will want to know where their nearest shop is, and how to get to it. This should be the page to do it. Just take a despairing look.

At the top it says, Below you will find details on Overseas Imports stores located in Tenerife. We are currently expanding our business to mainland Spain, so expect more addresses to be added here shortly. Since there are half a dozen shops in mainland Spain on the page, you would have expected the company (someone paid them to do the design) at least to rewrite this sentence.

The real crime, however, is their map. This is designer-centred design so bad it has to be called ‘teenage design.’ It aims to impress rather than inform—and it doesn’t inform at all. The tiny maps in the circles are of no use. Who could drive anywhere using them? In the case of the Benissa shop, they have a bit of a map which shows an area which is half an hour’s drive from the shop—and the arrow is pointing to a crazy spot on the main map.

If you look at the other pages, you will see graphics-free text pages with lines stretching across the page. And then this page, which uses huge static graphics. Google maps, with a simple enough API for real Web site designers, are free. I use them on almost all my expatriate Spain sites. I just can’t work out where the Web site design company responsible for the “Iceland” site is coming from.

In expatriate Spain, we are having a hard enough time. We deserve better from our Web site designers.

Posted in Business, Costa Blanca, Expatriate Life, Web design | Be the first to comment »

Designer-centred website design

Friday, December 19th, 2008

DesignWhat are the key features of designer-centred design?

  1. It looks great
  2. It doesn’t do the job it should be doing

It’s like finding yourself with a really stylish teacup—but the tea leaks out of the bottom of the cup. Or coming upon a breathtakingly elegant bridge—but it sways dangerously when you try to walk across it. You get the idea.

What are the alternatives to designer-centred design?

  1. Client-centred design
  2. Visitor-centred design

Clients are always asking us to incorporate features which we know are not in their best interests. As far as we can, we should calmly and professionally argue them out of such requests. Or they may ask us to change something which we know will work for them as it is. Ditto.

However, if we can’t persuade them, their site ends up being an example of client-centred design. This is better than designer-centred design, but only just.

The holy grail is visitor-centred design. Everything on such a site makes a visitor’s journey through it easier and more satisfying. And everything is on the site because we have spent a fair bit of time working out who its likely visitors and wanted visitors will be, and what they will want from the site. The client gets a site which works, and the designer gets a site to be proud of.

I have identified the obvious questions we need to ask ourselves again and again in this blog. Including my last post.

There I also said that I had one glaring example of designer-centred website design in expatriate Spain to present to you. It will be named and shamed in my next post.

Posted in Search Engine Optimisation, Web design | Be the first to comment »

Website design isn’t about the scenery

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

DesignThere are people who think that designing Web sites comes naturally to people who are computer-savvy. Other people think a good design is something visually appealing that they can see on a computer screen.

Bad luck. That isn’t what Web site design is at all.

Web site design is a form of information design, or communication design. On this blog, I’ve recently been developing a set of rules for good visual design. But visual design is only 10% of the iceberg. Real Web site design is the other 90%—the analysis and the research that precede and inform visual design.

What is the real purpose of this site? What are the things it has to offer people, because otherwise it might as well not exist? Who precisely is going to be visiting this site? Who precisely do we want to visit this site? What can we offer them when they get here? How can we make sure they get what they want—and in the way they want it? These questions have to be answered before a designer even sketches a page.

People don’t want to spend time on Web sites. They certainly don’t come for the scenery. They want to find out answers to their questions, buy a product, arrange for a service—and then get on with their lives.

Yes, visual design is important. But what that means is communicating efficiently with a specific set of users. So it can’t start until the site concept has been unambiguously defined. It has to come after overall site design, or site structuring. It has to come after navigation design. And in itself, it has to allow users to scan fast, get what they want, and leave. A page which is visually appealing in its own right may be an absolute disaster as visual communication of a message.

At its worst, the sort of design of which your uncle says, “Oh, that’s really good,” is designer-centred design, ‘Look, Ma, no hands!’ stuff. I have one glaring local example in mind, but before I spring it on you, I’ll have a bit more to say about designer-centred design in my next post.

Posted in Web design, Web development | 1 Comment »

cPanel for beginners 4: backing up your website

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

Are you being negative if you want personal copies of all the files on your Web site? I don’t think so.

In my fourth article on cPanel for beginners, I show you how to back up every precious file on your site—including your databases. (For a full list of these tutorials, look at the Articles and Tutorials contents page on the main Web Costa Blanca site.)

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