My search for creative inspiration...

...through serial pay per clicking

[pixel_juice]

I've recently been feeling that the visually creative side of my webmastering has become a little jaded. I've been hanging around on webmasterworld far too much, and I've started to think that it's all about content ;)

My approach has been to experiment with site designs and techniques that I have not really used very much. I wanted to find some sites that have put a bit more emphasis on aesthetics, and a natural place to look was for web design companies, who could impress me with their flair and creativity and give me some ideas.

Clearly the search engines are my friend in my quest for inspiration, and I thought I might share my experiences :)

I started at Google and searched for 'web design'. The results I got were content-rich, but on the whole not visually impressive and not really the sort of thing I was after. So I got more commercial, searching for 'web design company' and those kind of terms.

I was a bit disappointed with the results again, so instead I started clicking on some adwords, to find people who would have money to spend on design and would probably be a lot less SEO friendly and a bit more visually appealing.

I ended up clicking through over 100 paid listings on many of the major PPCs (sorry advertisers!) bookmarking any that I liked and making a few notes. I ended up with:

• 11 bookmarks

• A hope that well SEO-d sites will put more effort into visuals in the future

• A need to install the flash plugin in order to view this site (more times than I would care to count) ;)

• An increased dislike for sites with background music

• Pity for the 10s of advertisers whose ads returned black and white default server error pages (?)

• Determination to avoid dhtml menus. Check that they work in Netscape people! Those menus that disappear when I try and click on them...grrrr...

• Some good ideas

• Left-finger RSI
  

On the whole, I found the experience extremely illuminating :)

[Mike12345]

Left finger RSI - lol!

I may embark on a similar quest, not for the sake of getting RSI but for design inspiration.

Ta Pixel_juice, a good read. ;)

[dmorison]

Remember one thing -

You see your site every day - you live it, breathe it, and probably even dream about it.

So you personally might well get a little bored of it.

You just have to tell yourself that a new customer will be just as impressed with it as you were when you first created it... :)