Web design function

I had several meetings with clients today and I had a lot of interviewing to do to figure out what the clients needed because they had no idea. These were the second meetings with the clients, the first was the initial hiring meeting, where I got some basic info about the clients. As a web designer it is your job to steer the clients in what they need in their web design, and what they can expect from the web design. Before the conference you need to do a bit of research on the client and their business and prepare a way to design the site that will showcase their products and services. You also need to do a bit of research on the clients competition, notice what works on their site, and what doesn't.

Web Design
You should have a few web designs for the client to choose from when you go into the first meeting. These designs should cover a few different styles. If the company has a defined corporate image, it will be a bit easier to design the web site. When designing the preliminaries, keep in mind the aspects you discovered in your research and stress them in the web design.

If it is a sales page, you want to design the site around the products and keep the navigation as simple as possible. Make the web design easy to use before you make it look cool. When you are designing a sales page make the graphics match the products. Don't make a futuristic gamer-type web design for a teddy-bear website.

SEO is not an afterthought! Whether or not you are and SEO provider, you should read-up on it and incorporate some of the basics in your designs. Make sure your web design is easy to crawl and that your HTML is valid. Use all of the 6 heading tags and make them keywords. Fill in all of the meta tags and create a strong internal linking structure.

Keep in mind that some clients have horrible taste and are very disconnected from web trends. Remember, if you are going to correct someone's personal taste you need to inform them about user trends, and make sure to have an inventory of examples to show them. I always tell my clients when they are asking me to make something that looks horrible. They generally listen to me and no one has gotten up and walked out, yet. It is your job to give your clients the web design they want, but it is also your duty to provide input on what works and what doesn't. I had a client today that wanted me to make the text in the menu 45px tall, that's no good. I showed him every corporate web site I could find and humorously explained that not all of his client are as old or as blind as he is. He saw that smaller text looks more organized and more professional. I have many clients that now come to me and ask my opinion on other design issues in their advertising campaign because they know I shoot straight and speak the damn truth. Don't waste your client's time and money. If a client does have an idea that seems to be a bad design decision, try it out before you defend it, you need to compare the initial idea with your solution to the web design, preparation makes a big difference when entering a design meeting.