October 5, 2004
Recently, I had an interesting question posed to me by a fellow developer and member of a popular online forum. He wanted more insight into the characteristics of a professional site. He had been told by his peers that his work is "good" but not "professional," and this concerned him greatly. Immediately upon reading his question, it occurred to me he might benefit most from approaching the concept of professionalism from a completely different angle.
Ask 100 people to name five professional sites, and you'll likely end up with a list close to 500 sites long, some very well-known, some very obscure. You're likely to find a great deal of stylistic diversity within that list. You will find visually complex sites with breath-taking graphic composition. You'll find simple, clean site designs. You'll find sites made entirely in Flash. You'll find sites without a single image on the page.
It's quite common for aspiring developers to surf through sites looking for inspiration. It's equally common for developers to judge the professionalism of their own work against sites that have established professional reputations. Given the wide variety of presentational styles to which professionalism is attributed, a developer can go crazy trying to rank his or her site's professionalism based on what he or she sees on a screen.
This is because the wrong question is being asked.
The question is not "what does a professional site look like?" The right question is
"what do professional sites have in common?" Obviously, it's not presentational style, which as mentioned is remarkably diverse (not a commonality), though this plays a roll to a certain extent. The answer to the question of commonality is that one or more of the following characteristics can be found on all of these sites, presented in no particular order of priority:
- Sites must be easy to navigate. The flow of information must be smooth and intuitive. The truest mark of a professional is someone who can take content and do an exemplary job making it easy for visitors to digest.
- Information presented on a site must be meticulously edited for spelling and grammar. The second true mark of a professional is one who takes the greatest amount of care to choose his or her words well and use those words properly.
- Sites must be adequately functional in most user environments possible. This does not mean it has to validate to W3C recommended industry specification (it should, but the audience won't perceive this one way or another), or that it must be designed to a specific ideology (fluid - my personal choice, elastic, "Jello," fixed, etc.) as all have their strengths and weaknesses. It means the greater the number of people who can use a site comfortably, the more professional the perception of that site will be, whatever route the developer chooses to take.
- The reflection of reputation and credibility on a site are vital to creating an image of professionalism. Many of the most "professional" sites earn this distinction as much through what they do offline as what they do online. The most baseline purpose of a Web site is to communicate with the Web audience. What it communicates is just as important as how it communicates it. This may seem a little vague, but there are many ways in which credibility are built, and an equal number of ways a Web site can reflect this.
Notice up to this point I haven't said a word yet about visuals. This is because graphic elements, while certainly important,
usually do not provide the foundation of a site's professionalism. This is purely conjecture and very much open for debate, but a site with unprofessional visuals and professional content/navigation structure will typically be considered more professional than a site with professional visuals and poorly written or irrelevant content and navigation scheme.
Once you have a structure that is accessible, good navigational flow and concise, well-written content, then it's up to you how you want to dress it up. You can dress it up really fancy with animation, shiny buttons and happy-looking people. You can merge all of these components into a Flash/interactive site (with appropriate fallbacks, of course). You can take a simpler design approach. You could choose something in-between, my own preference. But like I said earlier, it's quite possible to have 500 distinctly different visual styles, all of which you consider professional. It's the other, more important concerns that these sites have in common.
The next time you're fretting over whether or not your site's visual design is professional enough, take a step back and see whether or not your chosen style complements the information you're presenting. Ask yourself if you've created a visual environment that reflects the nature of your message. If you do this, you should find you have a great deal more clarity about the direction your design should go, and you won't get bent out of shape trying to get it there!
Paul Hirsch
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Paul Hirsch is one of the site administrators for
IWDN and a partner/owner of
Equentity, LLC.
