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Design is Not Everything

When building a website, you may think that all you need is the web design, which is all you may be willing to buy.  

And this is understandable because it is what you see and what your customers see. 

It is also why page builders like Divi and Elementor are so popular with WordPress. You can quickly and visually set up how your website will look. 

But once traffic this your site and the business takes off, you realize other things are just as important if not more important than design:

  1. Is the site functional? Does it do what it is supposed to do for the user? Is the sales process working smoothly? Does the contact form send you all the messages? 
  2. Is it fast? With the Google update in May 2021, site speed is a factor in their ranking system, which means that slow sites will get a penalty and fast sites will get a boost. But that is not all. From a user experience point of view, if they have to wait 10 seconds for the cart page to load, they will abandon the purchase process. 
  3. Is it clear? This item is where design can shine when it focuses on clarity first and aesthetics seconds. It doesn’t matter if your site is beautiful if your users have no clue how to navigate it or what they should do on the page that just loaded. 
  4. Is it responsive? Does it work perfectly on mobile? Today’s data suggest that you should develop the site on a mobile view first and then check the desktop view. 
  5. Does it handle well spikes in traffic? You don’t want to have your site crash in the middle of a successful marketing campaign. 
  6. Is it secure? Is your customers’ data safe? Is your site well insulated against hacking attempts? Are you using the best security practices?
  7. Do you have a recovery plan in place? What happens in case of a hardware failure? Or if you get kicked out by the hosting company?

If you still think your site needs a stellar design to bring in revenue, look at Google.com or Amazon.com. Most designers would argue they can do a much better job. But how many can create a much better revenue stream? Or handle that level of traffic? 

I suggest you start your website by investing in a solid foundation, don’t just buy a “pretty picture” of a website.  

Using Visual Builders for your website

I used to hate visual builders!

They looked great on the demo page, but as soon as you would like to do something somewhat different and custom, you would end up fighting with all the constraints put in place.

Because of this issue, I would almost always design my pages from scratch in HTML code and CSS style. Oh, the power and flexibility!

In recent projects, I have been forced to use visual builders because the end client wanted to be able to update the design themselves later on. They insisted that it had to be easy, so I had to go the visual builder way.

What I have learned is that the builders have come a long way since I have first looked at them, and they offer great flexibility within the constraints of their design.

And the constraints are a good thing. It keeps your look consistent and makes it a breeze to create layouts for various screen sizes. That is always a big challenge when writing code from scratch without any design system in place that limits your choices but maximizes compatibility.

The Builder I like the most so far is the one that comes with DIVI, the WordPress theme. Once you get to know it, you can build exciting layouts pretty fast.

There is a problem I have with it, though. That is performance. And sometimes, the output code seems to be unnecessarily complicated, making the size of your page bigger than it needs to be.

So there is always a trade-off.

How do I choose between one or another?

For large projects, I prefer to create my custom template and design systems for the performance and flexibility benefits.

And for smaller projects, I will use DIVI or something similar to create the design faster and visually.

We go back to the saying: use the right tool for the job 🙂