Wow, that sounds really important. It's not. I just wanted to get the phrase 'Expert Web Designer' in the title of at least one blog entry this week. We'll see if that's enough to trick Google into thinking I'm an expert web designer. Though I might as well actually discuss web design, since the title is already written. Pull up a scroll wheel and turn up the volume...
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'Snark' also added to the dictionary. Check.
I'm always curious why some businesses will hire designers and then ignore their dearly-bought design advice. Clients often like filling in white space, making logos bigger, and lots of other little design tweaks done for the wrong reasons.
Designers can have some big egos, though few admit it. Ideally ego size would be irrelevant and designs would be unambiguously better left alone. Yet some designers want to bully their clients into a design rather than explaining the logic and psychology of why the design works with a smaller logo or more white space. Or they go the other way and surrender completely, allowing their client to run wild and the message loses focus.
I usually try to find out why my clients want to make changes. More often than not, the change may be accomplished by tweaking the design in other ways. The way I see it, they're paying me to be an expert, and part of that is understanding what they're trying to do and helping them achieve that.
There is a temptation to find out what monitor, browser, and operating system a client uses and design their website so that it will look good with that setup. This will give you a measure of comfort with your client, but is ultimately self-defeating as there is so much variety out there that much deviation from common browsers and screen sizes will lead to the site being less successful if the client's setup is nonstandard. Plus they'll be mad when they get a new computer and the site looks all funky. Also, you can miss things when you try to design to one browser and shoehorn the others in later.
My clients are usually looking to me to be the expert in this area. I will tell them that colors can shift quite a bit between monitors and operating systems, so what looks tinted blue on their screen may actually be a neutral grey most everywhere else. It is up to me to explain to them how their 3360x1050 monitor is not the norm (thanks again for stopping by, Mr. Jobs), and that most people are split between 1024x768 and 1280x1024. And that no matter what it looks like on their weirdo screen resolution (or mine, for that matter), what's important is how most people will experience their site.
I take it as a challenge to design the site without knowing how they will see it, and trust my judgment and expertise to make the site appear good on all browsers and platforms on at least a 1024x768 monitor. Note that I said 'good' and not 'the same' since differences can creep up. If the CSS is done right, there are no differences between the browsers and platforms, and at the launch party I'll fire up Opera for the first time, like a tightrope act, defying wrapping floats and variable box models to show off a site that looks exactly like the one they just saw in IE. Which is a pretty boring tightrope act for them.
It's more like a tightrope act where the audience is blindfolded. They've got no idea how nerve-wracking it really is up there, your Opera swinging in the breeze, with nothing between you and the broken CSS but three hundred feet of Open Source air.
My clients usually look to me to help them make decisions about what types and how much technology to stuff into their sites. In a lot of cases I'll advise against things popping and pinging for no good reason, and will firmly put my foot down when it comes to sound. "But we want the logo to go ping," you say forlornly.
"Look at it from the point of view of your hypothetical user," I'll tell you, "stuck at work and bored, hitting your site and *PING* your site busts them with the audio. They won't be coming back soon."
I don't know if anyone is dumb enough to surf at work without headphones, but nobody wants to get other people in trouble so the logos stay silent. (Mental note: find a browser plugin that makes whatever web page I'm on look like a spreadsheet when the boss comes around.)
Flash isn't always the best way to accomplish something, either, though sometimes it is. That sort of thing really depends on what you're trying to do. Pinging logos, apps and games are fine for Flash, but you can do plenty of interesting navigation in DHTML instead. It's tempting to just tell clients that the navigation is in flash, but it's really better to explain why I just used DHTML instead.
Ultimately, if you're the client, you're the boss. You are paying the bills, and if you feel strongly enough to override your design expert, then you might as well get exactly what you want, pinging logos and all.
Just don't be surprised when you read a snarky design blog entry about pinging logos.
