That website was not for me.
Your website is not for you
101–110 of 207 posts
Re: Your website is not for you
#102The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…
"in practice"? Disrespectful, of course, but also not true. In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack. Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
> In practice, most programmers write shit.
I mean…………
Re: Your website is not for you
#103I think the point is sound but the author is selling the fictional executives ("decision makers") short.
Design research will inevitably always lead to a place thats reductive, nostalgic, and average (i.e. https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-margi...). Designers themselves are loaded with biases and often enough want to perform design work that doesn't serve the business (in software we would call this Resume Driven Development - building with shiny new things so you can put it on your resume).
On the flip side, design is constantly victim to Dunning-Kruger or "bike shedding" - people with limited knowledge or competence in a domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence.
If the author was trying to write about the latter, they are failing to first acknowledge the former... for all we know the "decision makers" have decades of competent experience in brand, design, and user experience.
Re: Your website is not for you
#104The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…
They also very often don’t understand what’s easy and what’s hard to implement, what’s a real priority vs a nice to have, and have extremely strong opinions against off-the-shelf components and prefer building everything from scratch.
Also: The lesson of “don’t rewrite” from Joel Spolsky seems internalized in the minds of every developer, but "rewriting from scratch" is basically how designers operate by default.
Most of the explosion in frontend development complexity and amount of work in the last few years is because designers are inflating development costs and companies are eating it with smiling faces where complaining that developers are costly and wanting AI to fix the problem.
This kind of inefficiency and inequality in decision power is a huge thing in our industry. The same situation happens with QAs trying to play product and asking for modifications at the end of development that very often amount only to personal opinion and require developers to keep burning political capital to say no to.
I am not saying designers, QAs, PMs and developers should know everything, but when true collaboration doesn’t happen, due to personalities or political reasons, the result and the execution will always be lacking.
Re: Your website is not for you
#105Except when your website is for you. That being the case where you aren't just making it because someone else is paying you or you think you might get hired because of it. Those websites aren't yours, obviously.
I'm talking about the websites you make because it is actually your choice, not when you are coerced into it by external forces. That website is for you, it is your backyard garden of the mind and everything about it is only what you like. And it matters a whole lot more than anything you're being paid to do.
Re: Your website is not for you
#106I feel like I finally get to feel the designer’s pain when people arrive with their vibe-coded pile of garbage and I have to explain why it can’t just slide into the product.
It does something and it’s what the business wants. So what’s my problem?
Re: Your website is not for you
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people pay so much money for reports from dubious firms like Gartner? The game they are playing is almost like a coin toss. If you look at the Gartner reports that become publicly visible, they are often wrong. So why do reports from companies like Gartner still sell? Because they reduce the anxiety of the owner or decision-maker. Business is complex. Even a bad product can succeed because of advertising. Exag…
This, so much. I'm the IT Director of a medium sized (for our industry) company. Some years ago I worked with an amazing free-lance developer, and our then-director of marketing, to build a custom website that we were pretty proud of. A year ago our new marketing director paid mid-five figures to move to one of the site-builder services because 1.) the old CMS back-end to update content was "too technical", and the h…
> I expect next go-around they'll want to pay some big design agency for a custom site; it'll probably be six figures. I don't know how I should approach that discussion. Any ideas?
Keep your ear to the ground and when you start to hear rumblings of this happening, pay a skilled freelancer to update the old website (or just build a new one if its easier) to fit the new marketing director's taste. Solve marketing's problem, save the company a bunch of money, be the hero.
Re: Your website is not for you
#108had this exact fight. founder wanted it more corporate, designer had the research, designer won.
six months later pipeline was dead. buyers were enterprise procurement, the new look read as too small to trust with our budget.
research was right. just not about these users.
Re: Your website is not for you
#109The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…
I see it with new hires in our company. We are small SaaS app. Starry eyed business person thinks he can tell us whatever there is about making websites because our landing page is basically neglected. Business we are in B2B and this specific product is not getting customers this way. We get customers via CEO or business partners connections. All the “organic traffic” is waste of time for us because when they hear th…
If you are a B2B SaaS and you aren't getting big customers via the website, you're neglecting it. We get fortune 1000 customers from organic traffic, and we aren't a big company.
Re: Your website is not for you
#110The only problem with this analysis is that in practice a lot of the designers don't understand the customer and don't understand the business. Don't understand the market, at least compared to the founders or people who've been in the space for a long time. So there's a bit of a false confidence where the designers think they know what's really right because they did "scientific approach". But in reality the founder…
"in practice"? Disrespectful, of course, but also not true. In practice, most designers know what they are doing as well as you know your job. If yours doesn't, you hired a quack. Here. Try this, in practice, most business owners don't know what they are doing. In practice, most programmers write shit. It's easy to bitch at artists because most people don't understand what they do. Don't be one of those people.
Which types of designers? Because by the way you said "artists" it seems you're referring to graphic designers not UI/UX designers which, while they may make pretty websites and apps, are not artists and the article explicitly says to not treat their artifacts as such.
The website is a tool to get customers and most designers do not know marketing, scaling or growth engineering because it's not their job to know, it's the marketer's job to say, let's add an onboarding flow with these features and the designer collaborates with them on what it should look and work like.