Web Design Priorities

published by Dan in Usability | Website Design with 1 Comment

In an article Sue Weekes of the Recruiter wrote a few days back she asked a question faced by all website owners nowadays, “How useable is your website?”. As a web designer the answer should obviously be “very useable”. However, Weekes was quite right when she asserted that with online recruitment sites you couldn’t bank on a website being that good in terms of usability. The reason for this is, as Stephen O’Donnell, founder and director of UK jobs portal, AlljobsUK.com, pointed out, that “Many employer sites don’t have a cohesive plan. They often fall down by having different people responsible for the recruitment section of the site, than from the main site. The very best employer’s sites manage to seamlessly integrate recruitment into their corporate website.” What this means for the recruitment sites is that they are put in the back burner and get low budget web designer services that lack expertise in usability.

The sad fact is that this is true not only for recruitment sites of many companies but even the main sites of some businesses. Not realising the importance of usability many clients fall for pretty web designs that are not entirely that useable. A perfect case of the “form over function” way of thinking. Aesthetically many fall for website designs that are indeed pretty to look at but not good at all when it comes to usability. As a web designer make sure that all the web pages you design prioritises usability, after all I can never stress enough the importance of usability.

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