In the past 10 or so years the term “web design” has gone from describing an almost mystical trade to an over saturated term often misunderstood among those not in the “industry.” I go to networking meetings and often that have one to three types of businesses represented more than any others, real estate agents, insurance agents and web designers to the point a guy stood up at a recent event in Greenville,SC and said, “We should rename this group as the insurance-real estate-web designer network.” While it’s true that getting into those lines of work may involve a very minimal cost to enter in terms of equipment or office space their is still a lot of issues in regards to constant education that you don’t see.

I think however both real estate and insurance agents can agree with me in that they are a lot of myths and misconceptions in regards to their work. I’m sure a real estate agent does more that give tours of houses a few times a week, insurance agents do more than sit in an office waiting on someone to buy a policy. In the very same way those who provide web design services should be doing the following’

• Keeping up with changes in technology
• Being aware of and adhering to legal issues, especially in regards to communication law
• Studying usability methods that make a web site easier to understand by site visitors
• Optimizing a web site for search engines
• Working with the client to have the best content in terms of images, text, audio and video on the site
• Making security a top concern from good passwords, secure servers, secure back-end code
• Knowing the difference between proprietary software that get a site up quickly vs. a full-featured site the adheres to Internet standards
• Giving clients the ability to make site changes via an easy to use content management system (CMS)
• In addition to knowing good design principles know good development principles

Those just a few of the things you may not thing about when hear some says the are a “web designer.” I’m sure others could chime in with things clients were surprised that needed to be done. For all practical purposes the “design” is the easy part. Yes, we can get something up relatively fast to start with but if you want to sell items online or integrate a secure content management system be prepared for the process to take longer. A web designer doesn’t just draw up a pretty picture you can see on the web, a good web designer is also draws out a process. What have you been surprised by? As a company that provides these services what would you like to learn more of less obvious services?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Greenville,SC, Security, networking, web design, web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.