I have re-thought, re-worked and re-designed this website a total of 5 times since its conception, roughly once per year. Each time in an attempt to create a better web site for my company.
The bane of most web designer is true of me also, I’m never happy and am by far my most demanding, awkward client, often I’m starting another before I’ve even finished the last.
When I took the current version of this website live a couple of weeks ago I got an email from one of my clients wondering where my last version had gone, she preferred that one over the current, that’s the problem with designing for yourself, its the wrong approach, its not me I am trying to please, its mix of both new customers and existing web design peers. I liked the last version, it had impact, I redesigned because although the homepage was good, the design did not work on any of the more content heavy pages, everything was just too big.
When designing for clients you end up designing for two people, you and the client, whilst this isn’t the best way, its better than doing it or one.
What you really need to do is find out what the sites customers want, they are the people you are trying to impress, in fact they are the whole reason you are creating a website at all.
But how? you ask, try one of the following ~
- Pretend that you are a customer. This is the cheapest (its free) and can be useful, sit down and think about your customer, be detailed, who is he/she? once you have an idea of who they are, work out why they would want to come to your website, then, how are they going to get there and finally what are the going to want to do when they are there. Its likely that you will have more than one customer type who will have different reasons for coming to you and want different things, that’s fine, work your way through them all individually. Doing all this will help you identify the important things on your website, you can then make sire that these are easily accessible.
- Ask your current customers. This is pretty easy to do and in some cases can work. Put a feedback form or survey on your website, you may have to give people an incentive to fill it in and be prepared that most won’t. If you do manage to get data back though it can be invaluable in finding out what your customers want.
- Ask strangers. This can be expensive but if done well will be far more useful than the previous two. Get strangers to sit down in front of your website and ask them to do something, recording their actions etc. can be very useful in discovering areas of your website which are not very good.
Even if you don’t like what people say about your website it is always worth listening, and the beauty of a website over other forms of advertising or media is that it can be changed and improved pretty easily.
Peace out.
The 
