If you were to flash back say 10 years you would have seen that designing a website was a simpler affair. It just took one man who had basic knowledge of html and a love of tacky Gif animations to create a website. Sadly this is no longer this case, well I say sadly but in reality the internet is a far richer, easier place to spend some time these days, and Gif animations free.
I think that the video Gaming industry and web design has parallels. 10 years ago a spotty teenager with the social skills of a David Brent could create a million selling game. This was possible because coding games in those days was easier and they never had big budget musical scores or voice acting, as they do today.
Here in lies the parallels, with web design today you don’t just need to be able to code, there are so many other elements that go into making a successful website.
Not only does your website have to look kick ass it also has to be accessible to everyone. The logic in this is that every website should be available to everyone, which I agree with. A designer has to make sure it not only work perfectly in about a million different browsers, which they all interpret the code differently I may add.
These browser incompatibility issues are a perfect example of companies not working together to build a better web. I am not pointing my finger at any company in particular but suffice to say if it wasn’t for a big blue E then things might be a lot simpler. Not only that, a website has to look good in a text browser and be easily read by a screen reader.
Some websites take this too far, have you ever seen that feature on a website to change the font size? Man does this annoy me, let’s say for example I had vision problems then don’t you think I would have software installed on my computer that makes all text larger? I think you can do this through windows these days as well. So why would I need to enlarge the font size on your website. Unless of course you had made the font size too small in the first place. All this says to me is “look at me I know about accessibility and we care!” When in reality they are just misinformed show offs that couldn’t make a word document more usable.
If all this sounds like a headache then hire an ecommerce web design company that can worry about all this for you, furthermore, if you’re lucky can provide SEO services as well.
