Creating a Web Design That Sells

The holy grail of website design is not a site that wins awards at some design conference or at a geek convention. The holy grail of web design is searched for and found every day by designers and scripters just like you. This web design holy grail is a website that sells. Whether it sells products, services, or free information, it doesn’t matter. It sells. That’s what commercial websites are all about and that is what you should be striving for when you design a site for a business.

Of course, this selling isn’t always direct. Sometimes a site is just a glorified online brochure for a company. That site is still selling. It’s selling the company that you’ve made the site for, so it is still a web design that sells. Your goal as a website designer is to sell your client’s products, not to make flashy widgets that look really cool and accomplish nothing but wasted bandwidth and maybe an award or two for your portfolio.

This can’t be overemphasized. I am contacted by both businesses looking for website designers and by designers wanting to know if I have any work for them. I rarely match them up because those designers who\’re looking for work have portfolios full of work that might look good in an art gallery or a design show, but that is not what business sites need in order to succeed on the World Wide Web.

So now the question is, “what exactly is web design that sells?” Fortunately, that part is easy to explain. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to accomplish. Many web designers think of themselves as artists, but they think of this “art” in the wrong way. They think they’re visual artists who create art using the electronic medium of the web. That’s not the case. Web designers are more like interactive or audience participation artists. They’re more like illusionists and magicians than they are like mimes. This means your business site design is not about wowing the eyeballs, but instead getting the visitor involved in the site itself: getting them to click, to read, to participate. That’s the true art of web design.

To accomplish this, your design must be simple, but not boring. It must be interactive, but easy to use. And most of all it must be gently guiding the visitor towards a goal: usually a sale, or the piece of information they’ve been searching for.

Let’s look at an all-time favorite of ultra-simplistic design: Google. This home page is probably the fastest-loading page on the web that consists of more than just “.” Yet it’s one of the most user-friendly and most-visited sites on the Internet. Another great example is eBay. A little more complex, yes, but still fast-loading and very clean to look at. Very rarely does a visitor to eBay not know how to use this site—everything is laid out for them simply and neatly. All while still selling.

Simple and effective design is much more than just graphics and obscure talk about “visual flow.” It’s all about how the user interacts with the site and what the visitor can get out of the site quickly. Most definitely it’s about “selling” the site through its web design elements. Often this involves a strong mesh of team work between the designer, copywriter, and the back-end programmer.

The search for the grail continues as designers who understand their business continue to find innovative ways to make web design that sells rather than web design that wins obscure awards. Moving away from pure “art for arts sake,” they’re capturing the holy grail and winning the awards that matter: happy clients who come back and send their friends and colleagues. That is great web design!

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