Zero-G Creative

What comes first on the web?

Jan 21 2008

This is a question that I answer quite a bit and so I thought it might be helpful to answer it here. It’s sort of the “chicken and egg” question when it comes to the web: what do I invest in first, technology or design?

The question itself implies that your budget is such that you can’t achieve all you want in both of these areas at once and so you are forced to decide whether you want to invest your web budget on design or on programming. There are a lot of programmers out there that are bound to disagree with me, but I always tell business owners to focus first on navigation and organization, second on design and overall experience and third on technology.

The purpose of technology on the web — and we’re talking traditional corporate/marketing sites here, not community-based web 2.0 sites where the form needs to follow function — is usually to enhance the experience of the site visitor and/or to enhance the site owner’s ability to update the site, gather intelligence or solve operational inefficiencies. So if the overall organization of the site is poor and the site looks cheap or otherwise unappealing, the technology will never get a chance to truly shine. What’s the point of having a great back-end system driving a site that no one understands how to navigate or that no one wants to look at? How will you ever streamline your organization by sending clients online to a site they will hate using?

It just doesn’t work. On the other hand, a site that is organized well with your visitors’ goals in mind will always yield positive results as will designing a great looking front-end that projects the right image for your company. Do those things first and there will always be room for technology afterwards. As the old saying goes, you only get one chance to make a good first impression — and on the web that first impression may only last a couple of seconds if you don’t make good decisions when it comes to design.

Published by Erik Wolf under Web/Interactive