Why use a web designer? 2 of 6

Many good print designs are heavy on the graphics producing punchy and eye catching results – nothing wrong with that, especially as a website must also achieve an eye catching design. The problem arises when the page isn’t structured specifically for the web and the people producing the design for you aren’t website minded to maximise usability and page efficiency.

As web designers, we must take into account the size of an image or video and how long it will take to download. We must decide the best place for the menu and ‘call to action’ areas. On a billboard poster it’s fine to put important information along the bottom of the design as it will be seen by the viewer, but on a website this may not be visible on screen.

A web page must load quickly and display the information you want your client/viewer to respond to immediately… If it’s half way down the page, not instantly visible and needs a scroll to be revealed, it’s failed.

A web designer has the necessary skills to generate the best use of imagery; the positive structuring of the page to ensure it fits on any ‘users’ screen resolution settings and the know how of where to place the ‘call to action’ links.

Every screen is set up to a certain resolution that determines how much content can physically be seen on a screen. For example I use 1280 x 1024 on my screen, quite a high resolution, but pinpoint clear and it allows me to view more of a website page. Certain resolutions will display text and pictures bigger so that content will disappear from your screen and need scrolling to work your way down or across the page.

Web designers will have a reason of how and why to best to structure the page based upon the proposed end users screen resolution – for example in producing a high-end IT reseller website we would know the buyers (or viewers) would generally have high specification computers, so we, as designers, would design the page to fit a higher resolution screen knowing we can fit much more in the visible area of the screen. In contrast, when we were designing a general holiday home website, where the end users would have computers of all ages and screen resolutions, we would make sure we adhered to a more common resolution to ensure the ‘call to action’ areas were visible instantly (1024 x 768 is the most common used at this present time).