“Make Web Design Great Again” — FOR WHO?

I liked your take, but feel you left out one person. The person who pays the designer. And, if you asked *them* how to make website design great again, I’m betting their answer wouldn’t have anything to do with css or code.

I built my first commercial website in 1995…

There were fewer than 10,000 websites on the Internet, and most of them used tables or looked like today’s brutalist trend. They were ugly, but they sold stuff. Or at least (most of) the commercial ones did.

I built a site for a local Hobby Store. A few weeks later, I ran into the owner at the grocery store. He was over the moon. Said he’s getting orders from all over the USA. He though web design was pretty great.

Most people launch to crickets

I know a small local business owner that saved up $9,000 to hire a professional design firm. The code was clean. CSS was very cool. But no mailing list, no calls to action, no nothing that could count as marketing tools to be seen.

Partly her fault. A designer only builds what the client asks for, right?

I just ran across another example. A designer built a shopping cart with no login button or “view cart” feature. Know why? It wasn’t in the client’s spec sheet and it wasn’t on the approved mockup.

You couldn’t make this sh*t up.

For every guy who just wants to buy a pizza, there’s a pizza site owner that just wants that guy to be able to find his website. To just make enough profit off that website to recoup the design fees, seo fees and hosting fees.

“What makes design great” depends on who you’re asking.

And America?

In the same way, whether America is already great depends on who you’re asking. If you ask a heterosexual white guy with a decent income, yeah — it’s probably seeming pretty great.

But if you ask the family members of the 900+ people killed by police this year, you might get a different answer.

:)