Aug 19 2010
I was recently asked by a client to make some updates to their site. The updates were for a partnership with a vendor for a discount on their product for this client's members. All fine and good. Except that the vendor had very specific instructions on how the links we were including had to work. I'm not going to get into detail but let's just say usability experts these folks are not. But that isn't the issue here. The thing that makes me wince is that an organization or business would be so quick to let anyone dictate how specific things on their website should look or function. After all isn't it their website?
This scenario with our client, was um, unique. There was very little recourse as the site manager bowed to this vendor in every shape and form. Having a consistent, solid brand and user experience is not important to this particular organization so my words fall on deaf ears. And that's too bad. A company that believes and practices good branding will, in the long run, fare better than one that doesn't.What this really indicates is what so many businesses suffer from: a lack of guidelines and directives for how information - of any kind - should be presented on their website. And that's something that should be provided by the branding or web design team.
Enter the web design style guide
When we design a logo for clients, budget permitting, we include what's called an identity style guide. And to a degree we do that for websites too. But with this recent experience, it seems kind of obvious that it needs to be expanded on and more clients should be receiving something similar from their web design agencies. Having a style guide for your website serves several purposes: branding, visual and functional consistency, user experience, typographical consistency and overall cohesiveness of a site's design, tone and experience. All of these things put together work in unison to keep a site from becoming bloated with inconsistencies and from becoming a hodge-podge of last minute additions that weren't thought through enough to mesh with the rest of the user experience. Style guides should be given to clients as tools to help them keep their website - the same one they'll be adding new content to - looking as polished and as cohesive as possible. It helps deter situations like the one I described earlier and those WYSIWYG nightmares so many designers/developers go on about.
Moving forward
Admittedly, we are not super consistent in our delivery of a comprehensive style guide for the websites we build. In fact up until recently, the majority of the style guides we created were used internally. Shame on us.
So from now on, we'll be including a style guide with every site we design from scratch. It's just the right thing to do to keep our clients moving forward toward growth and success.