Offline Design Lesson 2004-2012
As you may know I have been running my own offline company for some years, but thats not the relevant part for this. What is important is the experience you gather along the years and how that experience can be used to avoid future problems or small issues on your clients side.
Lately we've been doing a lot of redesigns for our first clients, and I noticed one thing that is quite pertinent for us all working offline: some sites (even 5-7 year old sites) can be used today with no shame whatsoever. Others... well, they are really outdated.
In the end there are 2 categories we can divide these sites:
1) The ones designed with "fashion" in mind
2) And the ones designed with a more "plain/white" approach.
The first ones are outdated cause they were designed to fit 2004/2006 trends. And the second ones are good to go (if customers don't want to revamp them) cause they were made with no trendy approach whatsoever. They are cleaner, simple and effective.
Now that we have this information we'll be more careful when designing websites for local businesses and we'll add a new rule into our team: we'll skip some current design trends and focus (80%) of our attention on User interface design and sales funnels.
We shouldn't be selling trends - they come and go that fast - just sales funnels used online in a website.
Live and learn.
Fernando V
Lately we've been doing a lot of redesigns for our first clients, and I noticed one thing that is quite pertinent for us all working offline: some sites (even 5-7 year old sites) can be used today with no shame whatsoever. Others... well, they are really outdated.
In the end there are 2 categories we can divide these sites:
1) The ones designed with "fashion" in mind
2) And the ones designed with a more "plain/white" approach.
The first ones are outdated cause they were designed to fit 2004/2006 trends. And the second ones are good to go (if customers don't want to revamp them) cause they were made with no trendy approach whatsoever. They are cleaner, simple and effective.
Now that we have this information we'll be more careful when designing websites for local businesses and we'll add a new rule into our team: we'll skip some current design trends and focus (80%) of our attention on User interface design and sales funnels.
We shouldn't be selling trends - they come and go that fast - just sales funnels used online in a website.
Live and learn.
Fernando V