Forum Moderators: phranque
Does the designer know what's best with all their knowledge and information about achieving the end result? Or does the client know what's best due to their market knowledge and information about the end user? Who is ultimatly right, if any? How do you feel?
Any suggestions welcome!
But that subset is not really related to the poster's question, since I assume he's referring to general relationship between site builders and site owners, while using the term 'designer' to refer to the full group of people behind most at least large websites.
Personally, I have never seen a person who is both a good designer, as in visual, and a good technical type person. They may exist, I just have never seen one. I have seen many designers who don't know they can't do anything else well but still try, and I've seen many good programmers who don't know they can't design, but still try. And so on.
Anyway, not related to the poster's real question at all, except to show that exceptions prove the rule.
The problem is a lot of web designers think they are marketing consultants, but good marketing consultants dont work for $50 a hour designing websites do they :)
I suppose I must not be living in the real world, when (as a miniscule sort of designer) I am responsible for almost everything..
Re the original question, all qualifications aside:
sometimes, the client is right. The closer they are to their area of expertise the higher the odds are that they are right. If they say their customers will like something, they may be right.
Sometimes they are wrong. The closer they are to my area the higher the odds that they are wrong.
Very few customers, except ones with a lot of experience, will even know what a good, modern, professional site looks like, and will ask for horrible, late 90's design and features. Tacky TV look and feel, that is.
Sometimes the client is so wrong it's physically painful to do what they ask, especially when you know perfectly well that as soon as they see their idea in real life they will immediately see what a horrible idea it was.
I try to keep clients totally out of any technical areas of decision making, since their decisions have an uncanny habit of breaking through the theoretical 50-50 probability of being either right or wrong you'd expect when somebody is basically ignorant on a subject but has an idea on it anyway. In other words, whatever idea they have tends to be wrong much more than right.
The notion that the customer is always right just doesn't apply when it comes to technical questions that the customer has no idea of, such as the case ergophobe gave.
The ideal customer will slowly, over time, begin to realize that when you tell them something they want to do is bad, it's more likely you are right than they are. I've found that things like the client getting their site banned in google for doing something I warned them against but which struck them as a good idea at the time tends to make them less likely to insist on following or trusting their own opinions quite as enthusiastically in the future. Ideally, anyway.
The really ideal one just says, ok, I don't really know this stuff, you do it. That's rare, especially when it comes to the actual design of the site and so on.
But that's not the point of the original question, which is about somebody wanting something doing (design or whatever else you want to call it) and paying someone else to do it. Who is "right" about something, and who is "wrong" depends on the issue involved. It's a non-question anyway. The aim should be a harmonious partnership, a blend of skills towards a common purpose and a degree of give and take without anyone getting on their high horse.
There are thousands thousands of professional web designers who are good at design, technically sound, know how to attract visitors to a website, can write good copy, and all the rest.
If believing this makes you happy, fine. I have never seen any evidence that there are thousands, I think there may be a few per large city, at most, who qualify with these skills, really large cities I mean, hubs. My guess is that if I looked really hard, I might find 10 or so in the area I live [although I really don't think I could find 10 to be honest, but I'm trying to be generous], at best, that's highly skilled generalists who are also decent designers, not great, but decent. Most good technical people have the good sense to do what aspdaddy does, get a good designer to handle that end of things.
Once out of those areas, it drops to zero. I live in a major tech area, and there aren't thousands of designers with this skill set, there are a handful at most. And most of those are smart enough to have focused on a few major areas, good designers design, good programmers program, good seos do seo, and so on.
If you are one of these, good for you, but give yourself credit, you're one of a very small number, there aren't thousands, there is a small, very finite number. All you have to do to see this is to look at most websites that are made. Just because you see many of them here doesn't mean there are many, it means pretty much all of them end up here on WebmasterWorld at some point or other, or on other comparable forums.
And having followed these for years, I can guarantee you there are only a handful who are truly good at all areas, except design, I have never seen a designer who is good technically and at design, they may, as I noted, exist, but I have never seen them. You know, it's the old left brain right brain thing, it's not a metaphore, graphic design training is fine art training, and attracts a certain type. That's why I don't pretend I'm a designer.
After having read most of the forums here, and posted in some, if there were thousands, it would have been obvious, but it's not obvious, because there aren't thousands. Usually you'll see a small number of consistent posters in each area, and if you then cross reference them, you'll end up with maybe 10 or 20 posters who are decently skilled in most of the areas, guys like tedster for example, but even in his case I seriously doubt he deals with the actual design end directly.
but this is way off topic, irrelevant to the question asked.
I have never seen a designer who is good technically and at design
Having spent 25 years as a professional architect before moving to what I do now, I know that an architect needs to be skilled in many areas. The idea of an architect being good at "design" but technically unsound is as much nonsense as it is in the case of professional web design. Design as a discipline has to embrace not just "looks" but function too. And, as it happens (in relation to the original post), most architects don't get into problems with their clients over who is right or wrong about something.
Of course there are millions of crappy web designers, but the beauty of the web is that any fool can build a website (and long may it be so).
WebmasterWorld forms such an insular, yet global community, that it's easy to start thinking that stuff here is normal, but it's not. In many ways, what you see here may be all that actually exists out there. Well, add in the other forums out there that cover the same areas, all, what, 2 or 3 of them?
There aren't infinitely multiple copies of bretts and tedsters, they are members of a very small set.
never seen any discipline that attracts more flakey, low skilled people to it
But... don't you think this is part of the fun?
ps: probably, deep down somewhere, we're in agreement.
And once said 'web designer' starts showing an interest in programming, I see only dark clouds on the horizon in terms of all the fixes I'll have to be doing. However, that pales in comparison to the abject terror I now experience anytime an admin assistant chirpily tells me she has 'experience in making websites'. You know, opened dreamweaver once and made a site for herself....
If, on the other hand, the person calls themselves a web developer, I tend to start relaxing a bit.
My favorite: company x, not named to protect the guilty, proudly proclaimed it was using the latest in 'object oriented web design'... that meant using includes, simple php includes. Sigh...
I would guess you don't need to go very deep to find the agreement.
