Design vs Service question

Hello Rachel, welcome aboard.

I think it depends on the type of business and where they generate their customers from, unless you are specifically talking about online businesses.

For a website, design is critical, but I think it's the technical design of a site and optimisation that's the most crucial as this is how a site is found and generates visitors. Once onboard, the visual design then kicks in turning visitors into conversions and hopefully customers.

Obviously traditional avenues and word of mouth are important, as are social media and online reputation management. But from a design point of view, technical followed by graphic.

Just my 5 pence worth and hope it helps.

Thank you Steve, it's great to hear from unbiased people with experience with this and it helps a lot!

I fully agree with your comments as well, (working well in practice as to how I found this site!)

- Rachel Burnett

I fully agree with Steve's comments. First you give visitors opportunity to buy, download, share...and after, you choose the perfect color of buy button.

Dear Rachel,

It's crucial to measure everything on the website. You can start with simple google analytics, to find out basic performance of a website.

If you want to get the full picture of what's going on with visitor on a website then you should use such tools like CrazyEgg, Inspectlet or ClickTale (the coolest one, IMHO).

Good luck

I agree with technical followed by graphic, although obviously ideally both need to work, and especially if you have a highly visual product. (I don't necessarily mean products that are themselves visual, e.g. photos, but also products like clothes or food where visual presentation is very important.)

In my experience a good website starts with thinking about and answering the needs of customers - i.e. making sure for a bricks and mortar premises that the opening hours and location are prominently displayed and then designing to incorporate that.

Otherwise, I've see way too many 'pretty' websites that look nice at first glance, but actually fail to have vital information or are difficult to navigate.

if im honest i think you need a bit of both.

although, if you can generate a great reputation, it might be enough to sway people. if however you are just trying to get people to buy products without them knowing your reputation, the design has got to be important to convince them that you care enough to make it usable and pleasent.