But it really should.

Design is secondary. And design has a duty to perform i.e. to disperse the user’s attention is predetermined ways. I have said this before and I do not mind saying it again, it is that important.

Design is hardly the aspect of your website that is going to get people coming back; they may like the design, like it once or like it forever, but if the design is the only thing they like, they will not come back to your website, ever.

On the other hand, your website provides the users with what they want, and they will keep coming back, year after year. There is a reason that websites made especially for designers do not have, arguably, the best flash animation or the latest in CSS techniques implemented. What they do have is content that is relevant and designers keep coming back.

In my experience, clients would love to get to the nitty-gritty of design, ignoring the actual content of the website itself. The focus is purely on ‘looks’ and project delays are because of the back and forth of emails and design drafts. Seriously, design does not deserve this kind of attention. Design is important, yes. But not this important. Priorities need to be set straight before embarking on any project, and web development project is and should not be, any different.

A lot of the times, people would respond somewhere in the lines of, ‘I have heard of them websites, tell me what it is and maybe I will get you to make it for me.’ The Marketing students reading this, take note, this was the introductory stage of the product life cycle and ‘theory’ like that. Anyways, I would tell them what it is and how they could benefit from it. (Yes, 6 to 7 years back, there was less benefit of an online presence for a local store in Lahore, and it was much harder than it is now to sell websites and web development. But the benefit for a website developed in Lahore for a local business was beneficial back then as well).

I did try to sell websites by being very cheap. I stopped doing that years ago. For a very valid reason of course; quality comes at a price. I put a lot of effort into making a website, I hire expensive programmers to code even the basic of codes to get the best out in the market. Of course, sometimes I mess up, but I know I can deliver, God willing, because the cheap guy hardly wins. At the end of the day, I don’t pay the expensive programmer just because he is expensive, but because he or they deliver on time and deliver what was asked after following best practices. Goes without saying, I learnt that the hard way. The very hard way.

Now, things have changed. Now people usually ask for a website themselves. Surely, the times have changed. Website development in Lahore has definitely picked up, with a lot of people offering web design and development services. At the end of the day, it will not be who is offering what, but it will be how are they servicing the customer. For as I still strongly maintain, business is about relatoinships and their maintenance thereof.

This may be due to the fact that email is ubiquitous enough to even qualify as the perfect computer application.

There may be a lot of businesses that sell products or services through a ’shop’ that may never have used email (or letters or faxes for that matter). On the other hand, hardly you will see a company selling products and services through an ‘office’ that do not use email (or letter or faxes!).

That is why, in an attempt to service the email market of the world (we can start with Lahore! ), Treetech is offering a business email package, designed for companies who use email as their primary mode of communications. I have high hopes for this product/solution/package.

Just like Picasso relied on his technical ability of using a paint brush, so does the art form of Advertising relies on research findings and set procedures. But at the end of the day, it is art.

And the following is the work of an artist, using the right tools.

Who ever is going to visit your site? Why would they? There are billions of web pages out there, why would someone just stumble upon your page?You actually paid someone to design a website for you? Did not your 15 year old nephew offer to do it for a ride on a motorbike or something?

Who really reads a blog? There could possibly be no use of someone no one has ever heard of saying whatever he or she wishes to say…

Wordpress has certainly come a long way, and the massive popularity of this blogging platform owes its credit not to the fact that it is opensource, but to the fact that it is so darn good-to-go and intuitive!

It plays nice with the search engines, the adminitration side was already well above average (even before being done up in the new 2.5 version), the themes that were available were so well thought out and well documented that learning web development itself became a charm!

I always have had a leaning towards ‘legally free’ software, and this platform has been my ‘weapon of choice’ to give to Treetech’s website clients. We actually write a theme for Wordpress, make some (a lot, in fact) tweaks with the WP core, and viola; search engine friendly and functionally sound website is ready!

That post was well received.

While moving servers, that I did, again it seems, eons ago, the comments to that post were stuck in the middle. Thanks to God, the comments (which really are the heart of any website journal or blog) were only stuck and not lost.

Finally, I found the time (it’s Sunday today, please! ), to actually port the comments from my backup database to this website. It took a good one hour of my time, going to phpMyAdmin to access the “backed-up” SQL dbase

and then porting them to wordpress, comment by comment. Then moderating the comments’ timestamps (thank you Wordpress!) to get the chronology of the comments in order.

Finally, the post is ‘back in business’. If you do feel inclined, check it out here.

Thank you all who have commented and made that post a good discussion on Marketing and the Internet.

Unfortunately, it has not been done up properly. In fact, it has not been done up at all!

A lot of the website visitors are going to the website packages, only to be perhaps see just one ‘package’ (where the offering is so vauge that it may make your head hurt).

This has happened to others as well; paying attention to others’ websites will make you neglect your own. And this will go against practically everything that you preach.

The user experience needs to be improved. God willing. Here we go…

If you want your customers to click on ‘buy now’, the design should, in one way or the other, work towards that. Many-a-times, a design will take all the attention with the content being pushed in the background.

And by design, I am not referring to graphic design only but also information design. The following video of people missing out on your message should emphasize the importance of establishing the focus and then working towards it.

via Seth Godin’s blog

Imagine an information kiosk in a village somewhere near the small city of, say, Pakpattan (in the province of Punjab, Pakistan). Now, assume that someone who actually knew what he was doing designed and developed the kiosk and it is ‘live’ and updates itself using the Internet etc etc. And the kiosk provides information regarding agriculture. Brilliant. People just walk up, click on, say, pesticides, and see its application methods with regards to different crops. Or click on crops and see different methods of fertilizer applications, pesticide and water use etc. All good. But what if you were to design such a system?

You would write off English as the language of choice almost subconsciously. Then you would realize that almost everyone you have talked to who is the actual farmer, can not read nor write. So you scratch out languages from your list. Given these set of constraints, designing a user interface becomes the only thing that separates a good, working, helpful application from a ‘nice-try’. (And yes, user interface is almost always this important).

What would you do? Use images, of course. Again, not as simple as one would think. An image of a bunch of grass may represent ‘weed’ for your urbanized mind, but for the farmer, that is grass. What about other weeds? The narrow-leaf and the wide-leaf? What single image will speak to the farmer and say, ‘click/press me if you want information about weed’? (Yes, yes, images can talk like that. Picture and thousand words, remember?).

Microsoft is tackling this, as many others are. Designing user-interfaces that gets sold is what Microsoft does, really. During their research, they found (among many other things, I am sure ) that:

Another problem lies in the fact that different countries, different cultures and even people from different towns respond differently to iconic images. Anandan explained that the average image used in the U.S. for a home would look like two sides of a home and a slanted roof. However, someone looking for housekeeping work in India might see that icon and assume that it was a hut and not a nice home. In India, the icon for a home would have to represent a two-story dwelling, he said. (from ComputerWorld)

Had I not been so verbose, the following line would have sufficed to say what I just said above:

Design is for, and only for, the actual audience