171–180 of 207 posts
> It's a tool with one job: get the user to do the thing they came for.
In my experience, the people paying are often more sensitive to this than the designer. The designer wants it to look nice in their portfolio.
My website is absolutely for me. Anyone who wants to visit is welcome though, I put it online for a reason. (You're also free to move along for that matter, that's up to you.) The article states "A website isn't art". This product mindset fundamentally makes the web a boring place. I would personally welcome all websites that are art.
They're not talking about personal websites, they're talking about business ones.
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They're not talking about personal websites, they're talking about business ones.
The article makes no mention of "personal" nor "business". Why not mention that it's talking about business websites? The original author made a (wrong) blanket statement, and monokai called them out on it.
> The website isn't for the founder, the marketing manager, or the board. It's for the person you've never met - the customer weighing up a purchase, the lead chasing a phone number, the visitor sizing up your credibility or the member signing up to access gated content.
Which personal website has a "founder, the marketing manager, or the board" much less a "customer weighing up a purchase?"
Not everything is always spelled out.
And in this case, the article is exactly right, the website is not an art piece, it must serve the function of making people buy from you to be successful, otherwise your company is a very expensive hobby.
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One distinction the author didn't make was personal sites vs product / services sites. My personal site is for me, but the site for my SaaS app? That's for my customers.
_should be_ for your customers. Business minded folk can convince themselves that "ads are for the consumer because they benefit from knowing about our great deals!" but everyone else knows that ads are for the business to increase revenue. If they didn't increase revenue, the business wouldn't do it. If your website provides an actual utility, then that utility is for the customers. Everything else on the site (upse…
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But that isn’t the point at all. For most businesses, you’re not the target audience of your website, your potential customers are.
Yes. That’s the point. You’re in a conversation with your customers, their website interactions is your opportunity to develop your identity/brand. The way you yourself (assuming you’re the founder for example) feel about it does matter quite a lot
[1] https://amie.so
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I think it's implicit...
It is, but not until you actually get into the article. I also assumed the article would be about personal websites until I read it.
My personal website is absolutely for me and not anyone else :) It’s like saying the art I made is not for me !!!?
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Maybe that's why I am not in your target audience, but love how the design looks. I have bookmarked it also. You show so many features and it is nice in the way it is being presented and is also mobile friendly. Also I too am a fan of neobrutalism. :)
Thank you! :-)
The 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. Mos…