Web design philosophy - thoughts on design vs structure.

The internet, in my opinion, is first and foremost a visual experience.
But as a designer, I think that it is important, along with the website looking graphically pleasing to the eye, is its functionality.

There is no point in creating a site that looks amazing to sell your products if the customer has problems with being able to find the checkout to purchase your goods, or if they make it to paying for the goods, everything falls apart and error messages fill the screen.

Likewise if the site looks very amateurish, this in itself can reflect badly on you and your business too. If you entered a supermarket and the sign outside was shabby, labels for food had the wrong price and the staff were wearing their own clothes instead of a uniform, would you go back there again or even finish off your shopping? I know I wouldn't.

I want to feel confident when I'm about to spend my money and the only way to achieve this is to make the customer feel they are in very professional, capable, straight talking hands.

Good graphic design + functionality = a good website = confident customers and visitors.

There are some truly inspirational graphically designed sites out there and there are some excellently constructed sites that function incredibly well, yet if you're not a web designer or developer you may not appreciate the work that some people put into these sites, as you don't see the code they have written and the time they have put into the web site.

Here are a selection sites that work very well and function according to the needs the site requires.

Wikipedia Gumtree Ebay Amazon Love Film My Space You Tube Lulu

I imagine there a few websites here that may not be to your design tastes, but they are a perfect example of good web design vs functionality. They are also good examples of a recent buzzword people choose to call 'web 2.0'. I found a good quote to describe 'web 2.0' on a blog by a guy called David H.Numan. He describes it in his own words as "What is web 2.0 in a nutshell? I believe it is simply an emerging mindset of creative people on how to best use and improve the Internet technologies available today." He found his information from an interesting article by Tim O’Reilly.