If you asked ten people to look at a website and say if they liked it or not, you'd probably get a wide variety of responses from 'Hate it' to 'That looks good!'.
What is one persons Jedward, is another persons Leona (it pains me to use an X factor comparison but hey). There are very few areas of the Internet which provoke such emotion and talking points as web design and how a website should (or perhaps shouldn't) look.
I've been in many meetings with MDs and marketing managers of companies telling us how their websites should look and how it should be one way or another. In a large majority of instances, it is the case that they know their markets better than anyone and therefore have the ideas on how their website should look to get the best results.
But in some cases recently, we have seen that what is perhaps viewed as a bad website or something which looks old, boring or out of date actually outperforms websites which are cared for and have much attention & money spent on them. Some people might look at a website and say the design is rubbish. It's fine to have an opinion but if the person making the comment isn't part of the target market, how much value should you put on their opinion? By the way when we say outperform, we are talking about online sales and/or online enquiries which in 99% of cases is the most important measurable, not visits or even worse 'hits'.
How do we know this? Website statistics. An often overlooked part of the web design and build process (especially in our experience for smaller digital agencies) is the analysis of statistics. They help us to understand what works from a traffic perspective and also from a user point of view. Whilst some packages such as Google Analytics do an amazing job of telling us what is going on at a top level, they still lack detail at the individual (but there are ways to find this out).
What Google Analytics, and in particular, Website Optimiser, allow us to do is test out our theories on the design side of things to see what works best for each client. What we believe to be the 'best' design often isn't the best for the market. What we prefer and assume will work best, often wont. Ideally we should let
The point I'm trying to make is that there is no 'best' design and you shouldn't be thinking there is. There are now many tools available which allow us to test and tweak versions of web pages to try and find the most profitable or successful version a page. We shouldn't be stuck with our own prejudices and accept them as being the best, we should let website visitors decide for us. Perhaps if more of us thought like Simon Cowell (heaven forbid!) and let our own audience decide for us, in the way the public votes for their favourite X factor contestant, our websites might get better results.
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