August 31, 2006

Interview with Aidan Walsh

Written by Brian Turner

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Aidan Walsh is the owner of Seed Design, a professional graphic and web design firm based in the UK, specialising in delivering quality design to small to medium businesses and startup companies. That sounds like a hundred and one other companies, right? So you’ll be wanting to know what makes us different.

Let’s get cost out of the way first - there are cheaper places than us. We’re quite open about that. If you’re looking for cheap design, we’re not the company for you. However, if you want value for money, Seed is hard to beat.

It’s important to us to remain affordable to our clients, many of whom are startups, but we’re not going to short-change them by producing low-quality work for a low price. We would much rather develop an ongoing business relationship with satisfied customers who have paid a realistic price and seen a return on that investment.

Every company that goes online needs a website, of course. But before they begin, what would you say are the most important design and developments of setting up a website in the first place? Should any business have a check box of issues they should be aware of from the start?

Probably THE single most important thing is to know who your target market is. Everything else about the website should stem from attracting them. Don’t make the common mistake of designing for yourself - you aren’t trying to attract yourself as a customer, you’re trying to attract OTHER people.

One of the advantages of hiring a professional designer is that because they aren’t a part of your company, they are able to be much more objective about the needs of potential clients.

You also need to know how your website will fit into your marketing plan. Websites rarely work well when used as a sole means of marketing and advertising - they’re much more effective when combined with other methods.

Don’t look on your website as a seperate entity - integrate it into the rest of your marketing plan.

You’ve mentioned before on the Platinax Business Forum about the importance of having a unique design for the internet. What sort of priority do you think a new business start-up should place on a unique web design from the beginning, or is it something that companies should aspire to as they become more established?

I wouldn’t limit it to just websites - most companies, especially startups, would benefit from professional design services full stop. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of companies view design as a necessary evil, rather than an investment which will enable them to reach their target market more effectively.

I would advise most startups to pay for a professionally designed identity (logos, business cards, stationery and so on) and start with a simple website that reflects that identity. The identity is the face your company projects to customers, suppliers and the world in general - it needs to be unique and relevant to your company.

You want to be projecting a professional image to these people, and a badly designed identity will put people off and lose you business. That’s really what it boils down to. Once you have your identity, you’ll want your website to fit in with it. This doesn’t need to be expensive.

The website itself can be fairly simple, what’s important is that it carries your company’s branding in a manner that is consistent with the rest of the company’s identity.

Most companies that are just starting up won’t need a fully custom-built website. The only real exceptions would be certain internet-based companies that require specialist design as part of a service they offer - for example, an online auction site or similar.

For most others, start simple and expand on your site when you need to.

One of the biggest headaches about having a website is when it finally comes to changing a design or even a software platform being built upon. What sort of steps do you think a business can take to minimise these issues from the start, and help provide for easier transition if required to make fundamental changes to a website?

This is a common issue that website developers have to deal with. Firstly, and I know this sounds obvious, but you need to know what you want from the website. What features do you need? What sections? You should know how the whole thing will work before any coding starts. If you try adding things in as you go along, chances are you’ll end up with a bit of a mess.

Secondly, plan for change. Use a CSS-based layout rather than tables. A CSS layout will usually cost slightly more to develop, but they allow you to make site-wide design changes much faster than editing every page by hand. Because of this, you can recoup the extra cost very quickly through time savings.

Using a Content Management System (CMS)can also help. A CMS is basically an interface for people to add, remove and edit content, as opposed to hand-coding changes. If you are likely to be making regular updates to your site, a CMS can be a worthwhile investment, as you won’t be paying a developer to code minor changes for you.

Again, a system of this sort will bump up the initial cost of your site, as they require a significant amount of work to set up, but it may work out more cost-effective in the longer term.

To me, one of the biggest challenges of being a web designer must surely be dependency on one-time fees rather than recurring subscriptions. How much of a problem is this in actual business practice in terms of company revenues – do you find yourself engaging a regular stream or work, or does being a web designer mean you are subject to sometimes large swings of revenues from month to month?

This isn’t really that much of a problem for Seed. Design firms don’t really have to worry about stock (other than making sure you have enough pencils!). Seed was also set up from the beginning to run with very few overheads which are easily covered.

However, one-off fees can also work against the client, especially for startup companies. Because of this, I’m currently looking at alternatives. I don’t want to say too much about this at the moment, but as far as I know it will be a unique system among design companies, so things look quite interesting.

Well, as interesting as payment structures can get, anyway!

I’ve got to ask – W3C and website standards. Are these really important for a business to consider? Or is having XHTML 1.0 compliance simply an issue for designers to be concerned about? Additionally, should any business whose website does not conform to W3C standards really be concerned?

This is quite a common question, so I’m glad to be able to address it here. Web standards are purely voluntary - nobody will tell you to take your site down because it doesn’t adhere to W3C specifications. But on the other hand, following the current standards is good for everyone. This goes hand in hand with the compatibility question I see coming up ahead.

The holy grail of website design is for all browsers to show all websites the same way. In order for this to be reached, browsers need to know how they should be interpreting code - this is where standards come in. The sooner website developers adopt those standards, the sooner they’ll stop having cross-browser headaches.

Their clients will also benefit because they no longer have to pay for extra time needed to code tweaks and workarounds for different browsers. Everyone’s a winner.

Also, I think you gain a little credibility if you can say your website is standards compliant, especially if your site is technology-related. Besides, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, too. Honest.

Cross-browser compatibility. What sort of nightmare do these three words conjure up? Do you see Internet Explorer 7 as actually helping bridge the problem of cross browser compatibility, and how do you see the rise of Firefox and the continued small but significant market share of Opera as affecting design requirements? Additionally, do web designers ever actually test their designs for Apple Mac browsers such as Safari?

Cross-browser compatibility… those three words are scary only because of another two words - Internet Explorer. That browser is a prime example of why we should all support W3C standards.

While virtually every other browser will generally show a standards-compliant website as it was intended (with relatively minor variations), Internet Explorer pretty much gives the middle finger to standards and does its own thing.

I’ve heard conflicting reports on whether Internet Explorer 7 will improve the situation or not. One source claimed that it would be following standards much more strictly, another said that it wouldn’t because it would mean that almost all websites coded for previous versions of IE would then look broken in version 7. I suspect that the truth probably lies somewhere between the two.

Firefox (my own browser of choice) is steadily gaining popularity, but unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 is still top dog with approximately 60% of the browser market share. Tell your friends that all the cool kids use Firefox.

As far as testing for other platforms and browsers - absolutely. In my view, that is simply part of doing the job to an acceptable standard. Anyone can be a potential customer, not just Windows users. It’s actually easier to design and code pages for Mac and Linux than for Windows - basically because they don’t use Internet Explorer!

There’s a bewildering array of web design companies out there. Do you see any specific advantages for a UK business to hire a company that uses only UK web designers? Or is it just as valid to pay UK rates for a company to simply outsource to developing world designers?

Have you ever phoned up a company that outsourced it’s customer support services? Well, that’s why outsourcing isn’t a good idea.

Less flippantly, outsourcing has the potential to greatly improve the effectiveness of any business, but unfortunately a lot of companies view it purely as a way to cut costs with the result that the end customer suffers from a lower quality product or service.

On the other hand, sometimes having a specialist company take on part of your workload can improve your business’s performance. Seed Design occasionally outsources specialist programming to an overseas developer, simply because we recognise that working with a specialist can help improve the service - there is a cost saving, because a specialist is likely to complete the given work in less time than it would take us to do it.

But the focus is always on improving the quality and we take full responsibility for the end product.

What would you say is the best way to decide which web design company is right for a business, start-up or established? Would you say it’s an issue of personal relationship, price, artistic vision, or a combination of factors?

A good question, and a tough one. It’s definitely a combination of factors. Personal relationship is very important, in my view. The best situation for a client and designer is an ongoing long-term business relationship, and that requires trust.

The client is basically putting the “face” of their company in the designer’s hands - they need to know that the designer isn’t about to mess their face up.

(That sounded slightly disturbing when I read it back to myself…)

Some companies are more interested in making a quick sale than in developing an ongoing relationship with a client, which I think is a very short-term view as an ongoing relationship benefits both client and designer.

The client benefits because they are continuing to work with someone who understands their brand, and the designer wins because they are likely to have ongoing work from a satisfied customer.

When choosing a design, how important would you say it is for a business owner to be aware of issues such as Flash, SEO, and disability accessibility? Are these issues that the business must trust the designer to make valid judgements on? Should any business expect to have an input on such issues? Or would it simply be confusing for them to try and make decisions where they themselves may not have enough information?

I’ll start by being slightly pedantic. Issues around Flash, SEO and so on should be addressed well before you get to the stage of choosing a design. The first step in the design process is to be clear about what the client’s requirements are - if a designer submits designs that don’t address those requirements, then he or she is wasting the client’s time and money.

In assessing what those needs are, I would say that the designer should be able to take control of all those issues - should the client so wish. A client should be able to trust the designer to make the right decisions regarding technical issues (as well as aesthetic ones).

Usually, that kind of trust develops over time - another reason why an ongoing business relationship works out better for both clients and designers!

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