This post is by Michael Pollock, the original owner of Small Business Branding. Yaro Starak now owns and produces the latest content for this blog.
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How much time and money should you spend on a beautifully designed blog, website or marketing materials? Personally, I’m a design freak. I like my blog and other materials to look good. But frankly, it’s not always a good business decision to invest the time and money it might take to make it look beautiful. It just makes me feel better.
I probably never would have said that publicly until I read a post from Peter over at The Blog Studio blog titled: A well designed blog is a luxury item (after all, who needs a bunch of pissed-off designers telling you what an idiot they think you are for marginalizing their craft, which I’m not, but I’m sure many would take it that way).
"The argument that I’m going for here is that by investing in great
design, you feel good about your site, you take care of it, it
flourishes, etc etc. But I have to remind myself that there is no point
to luxury other than making you feel good: there’s no need to make a
business case for it. It is its own justification."
Ultimately, I believe if your budget allows for it, beautiful design if a great thing. What really matters though is the clear communication of your message and a high degree of usability. People need to know who you are, what you do and why that matters to them. It needs to compel them to take the next step toward beginning a relationship with you (e.g. contact you, sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, request info, etc).
Of course, if a big part of your brand image is beauty, then you need to maintain that image. Can you imagine Apple posting a page on it’s site that looked cluttered, cheesy or anything other than deliciously elegant? Just wouldn’t work. We’ve come to expect certain things from Apple, and they need to at least fulfill, if not exceed, those expectations every single time.
I always use del.icio.us as an example of a product that’s one of the most popular applications of it’s kind. And it’s ugly. For those of us who use it though, we don’t care what it looks like. It does what we expect it to do each and every time we use it, and it’s pretty damn easy to use. Okay, I know it’s free, but even if it wasn’t I’d still use it. A more aesthetically pleasing design may give it a sharper edge as competition increases in the social software market, but for now it’s a pretty strong competitor.
Ultimately, I think you have to understand what your core network of people expects from you. If you are a copywriter, they expect great copy, so your design is relatively unimportant. If you are some sort of designer, however, people probably expect beauty from you. Whatever the case, make sure to make your message clear and compelling with a parallel focus on ease-of-use. If you can afford the luxury of beauty, by all means, please make that investment. I, for one, will appreciate you for it.
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