Website as Art: What is the Purpose of Your Website ?

“Build Gorgeous Websites” says an advertisement from Wix.com, a recent entry in the website development tools arena. This notion of website as art is also reinforced by a cottage industry of web designers who would like to spend your money to build one for you.

Is this really the right way to think about your website ?     

What did one of the greatest designers of the century have to say about the topic ?    

"Design is not what it looks like or feels like. Design is how it works."   Steve Jobs.

How is a website suppose to work ?  The primary purpose of a website is to facilitate the sales and marketing function of the enterprise. As such, a website has several critical functional roles:

1. Communicate Basic Business Information:

1. value statement to the customer

2. location, contact information

3. working hours and preferred communication mechanism

4. background information which engenders trust and “thought leadership”

2. Customer Engagement:

1. eCommerce for products and services

2. scheduling of interaction between clients/company

3. update of consumer specific information

4. analytics which help understand customer behavior

3. Front-End of Business Operations

1. coherence point for client contact information

2. coherence point for sales information

3. front-end for database to drive future marketing/sales initiatives

For any website, form must follow function. For example, building an artistic website with a high degree of graphical content which cannot be consumed by search engines is not very productive. However, personalizing with appealing content above a clean functional infrastructure can be very powerful.

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