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Whoever said you have to be a designer to create a website?
Quick! What word comes to you mind when I say "web"? Is it "design"? What is the job title of a person who does websites? Is it "designer"?
Actually, many web professionals aren't good at design at all. Some of us are writers, editors, marketers. Some of us are programmers (though they prefer to be called "coders" or "developers" or even "software engineers.") Some call themselves webmasters, though sometimes a webmaster is responsible for running a website more than for creating it. And yes, some web professionals are graphic designers. Perhaps the best generic term for "people who do websites" is "web developer."
But here's a trivia question for you that proves my point. What was the occupation of the first webmasters in history? The first people who regularly created web pages as part of their work? Were they computer programmers? Graphic designers? What were they?
If you guessed programmer or designer, you'd be wrong. Give up?
The first website creators were particle physicists! They worked with CERN in Switzerland, using cyclotrons and quantum theory to explore the inner workings of the atom. The first websites (example) were created to help physicists share their latest experimental results with one another. Otherwise, they would have to wait until their articles were published in professional journals before they could get any feedback from their peers (or catch them on their coffee break).
Do you see my point? These people were intelligent, to be sure, but they didn't have the time or interest to learn graphic design theory. Their interest was in neutrons, neutrinos, and quarks (left-handed, strange, or what have you). They wanted to know enough about web pages to communicate with their peers. And it wasn't hard. Most of what they did involved about five formatting codes. Tim Berners-Lee created the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) for them in 1990. P meant paragraph, TITLE meant title, H1 meant Heading 1. Sounds pretty obvious, doesn't it? The codes for images and links are only slightly complicated. Maybe you didn't know that, if you want to insert your logo into your home page, you should use <img src="logo.jpg">. Maybe you didn't know that before. But now you do.
No, the physicists of CERN weren't computer programmers or graphics designers. They were physicists, as I have just mentioned. More importantly, they were people with something to say. In that sense, they were people just like you. To create a website, all you need is something to say.
Does that mean we don't need web designers? Far be it from us to say that. We are primarily a web design company, after all.
The problem with many web designers is they forget, in the midst of their professional graphic sensibilities, they forget the most important part. Websites are for people who have something to say. Some graphic designers, especially those who were trained in Photoshop and print media instead of learning how the Web works, are tempted to think that the main point of a website is to look good. They have a point. Visitors to your website will judge you by the way your website looks.
But search engines won't. The Googlebot can't look at pictures. It can read text and a little more. If you want your website to come up when people search Google for "Florida real estate," you really ought to talk about Florida real estate on your website. You should use those very words, in fact, several times, in prominent places. Fortunately for you, the online web page creators at Stylecascade.com make it easy to include your keywords in prominent places. But no designer can tell you the best words to describe your business or organization.
Visitors may get their first impression of you by looking at the design of your website. But return visitors won't. Before deciding to return, they will look at the content of your website. Does it provide information they need? Do they find it interesting? Do they like what it has to say? Does it have anything to say at all? No designer can tell you what to say about your business.
There's a principle behind all this. We know the principle, so you don't have to remember it. Most web developers don't, unfortunately. The principle is: content should be separated from presentation.
Do you catch the significance of that? It means you can write content for your website without having to design a website. In other words, you need to title your web pages, you need to write paragraphs -- but you were doing that when you were eight, weren't you? You don't need to design how your titles should look, or even decide where the paragraphs should go. You don't need to lay out the page design. That's why it's called design. Designers design. Designers do designs for a living. You don't.
Stylecascade helps you organize your web page into sections, headlines, and paragraphs. Then, we use style sheets from talented designers to give your website a professional, attractive look.
