Designing websites for 10 years
January 30th, 2008This will be my 10th year working on the web. I was first employed by The House of Synergy in 1998 as a web designer. Since then I’ve worked for agencies and corporates in South Africa and England. I’m now working for PruHealth as a senior web designer.
I started on Photoshop 4, running on a Silicon Graphics machine, where there were no dynamic filters, no transform previews and if you wanted to edit text you had to delete the layer and retype!
I learnt and wrote HTML in note pad and tried to understand the intricacies of JavaScript, being the only tool I had access to which could bring a webpage to life. Other than an animated gif of course!
I’ve learnt a great deal in that time, not only about web design but also about what people (agencies, end users and management) expect and want from the web.
I think the biggest realisation for me is that the average website visitor to the average website isn’t actually all that interested in what the page looks like (above and beyond being readable and understandable), they are more interested in the information they can gather and the speed at which they can do it.
Through many one-sided-mirror usability testing sessions I have realised that I could have spent half the time I actually needed to on the subtle design tweaks. As long as the user journey is clear and the content well written the visitor is usually happy.
I would like to add that there are still many visitors who appreciate all the effort designers put into their work. In certain industries this high standard of design and detail is absolutely required by both visitors and owners alike.

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