Websites: IT vs Creative Design

When you are having a website designed for you, there are two sorts of companies that can design one for you; an IT company, or a creative design company.

Creative design companies are doing very well, and it's not surprising, they are producing some fantastic looking websites. They come out with really impressive designs with rich functionality and it looks liek the future is already here when you see what they can produce for you.

But what about IT companies?

What's the point of going to an IT company for a website? A website is like a brochure, isn't it? It just needs to look good and impress the visitors, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, that's the predominant belief amongst business owners. A website is a creative design project, not an IT project. Most people are aware that writing a basic website is pretty simple, so you don't need an IT expert to do it. People assume that the way to get the edge on your competitors is to have  abetter designed website.

And that's what the creative design agencies will tell you too. And those people that keep phoning you up asking to redesign your website for you, they'll tell you that you'll get more customers if your website looks better and has all this flash and shockwave stuff all over it.

It's a very convincing argument, if it wasn't for just one thing.

Google is not a human. Yahoo is not a human, MSN is not a human, and neither is Ask.com.

They do not care what your website looks like. In fact, they haven't got a clue what your website looks like, and they couldn't care less. If your website is the best looking website in the world and your competitor's is the worst. The search engines do not know and do not care. They care about how well it matches what their visitors are looking for.

And designing a website for that is an IT job, not a creative design job.

Search engines are simple machines. They take a look at your website and try to work out what it's about. They try to work out it's quality on that subject and they try to rank it appropriately against other similar websites. With billions of websites on the internet today, it has to do this very quickly, so it's not going to spend too long trying to work out what your website is about. You have to make sure that search engines can understand your website quickly and correctly.

The sad thing is the using flash, shockwave or too much javascript or other modern technologies make it very difficult for the search engines to understand your website. And if it can't work it out, it won't get ranked very well. Spending all that extra money on a flashy design is likely to actually count against you compared to just having a simple design.

Impressing your visitors with your website is secondary to getting them there in the first place. And that means you need to impress the search engines, before your visitors.

And that is an IT job.

IT people are more likely to understand how the search engines will see an understand your website. It's a left brain - right brain thing. Search engines are created by left brain IT people, so you need left brain IT people to work with them. Creative designers are generally right brain people, and that makes them good at creative design, and not very good at IT.

OpenGlobal IT, as the name suggests, are an IT company who understand how search engines work and how to create websites that bring in results, not just gasps of admiration.