It's crazy late Sunday night--or crazy early Monday morning--and I'm still lost in the world of web design. Boy, do I ever love it in here. Whatever you can dream up, you can create!
There are a few caveats though...
For one thing, the speed of imagination outpaces the speed of design at a ratio of about 100 to 1. And the speed of design outpaces the speed of production by about 10 to 1. So mathematically speaking, the speed of imagination outpaces the speed of production by... you got it: 1,000 to 1.
If you want to enter the world of design and you intend to be involved in the creation process from start to finish, be prepared--the need for patience on the back end is significant.
As a by-product of the imagination-to-production ratio, there's a tendency for us creative types to forge on ahead with our wild ideas while the production process is still chugging along at a relative snail's pace. At some point, the creative process has to stop to allow both design and production to catch up.
If you ever want to see a design specialist go stark raving mad, try changing the design specs on their project four or five times a day. The same goes for the production team, but they'll go crazy over just one change per day. They're very down-to-earth, those production folks.
The best way to handle creative types--myself included--is to force us to enter the physical design process. Nothing grounds the imagination like good old-fashioned pen and paper. Computers work too. Anything that forces the imagination into some kind of tangibility will throw a healthy dose of realism into the equation.
Laying out the design work for the new site, we soon realized that we were looking at far too many pages to be realistic right out of the gate. The navigational system alone was turning into a nightmare.
As a general rule, users need to be able to find what they're looking for within two mouse clicks. You might get three clicks out of someone with a cable modem, but then again you might not. And for everyone who still has a 56K dial-up connection, forget it. You'll lose them after two for sure. You might well lose them after one.
On the other hand, if you can engage your visitors within those two clicks, then they might decide to surf your site for a while, just to see what else is there. But you have to reward them with a worthwhile experience in every new click or they'll lose their interest.
So we've nailed down the specs for "Phase One," and we're well into production mode on the new site. All critical information is one click from the home page, with secondary clicks providing even faster "in-page" navigation for the most attention-demanding customer.
And I've promised to limit all daydreaming to Phase Two and beyond. But that's fine by me. As soon as Phase One is up and running, I'll be ready for 'em.
