October 15, 2014
It’s known fact that web designers run on coffee. Most people have a cup or two in the morning. Maybe one later. Here in Vancouver, our team brews coffee by the barrel.
Our old coffee machine just couldn’t keep up with the demands of our web designers. So it was time to replace it.
As web developers, we love functionality. Fast and efficient code is the holy grail of what we do. Sometimes we can’t help but apply that love to other areas.
So we replaced our broken machine it with a 42 cup coffee tower!
When you strip the web design process down to it’s most basic equation, you just add coffee to a web designer and a great website comes out a fews week later.
As web designers we are always thinking about how people use our products. So naturally when we turned on our new pot, we began to critique the design and talk about the core functionality of the device. Cleaning it was a little difficult, but the coffee is always hot (and we can make ALOT of it).
The 42 cup coffee barrel meets our coffee needs. Which got me thinking about UX (User Experience).
Great Web Design and Our New Coffee Pot.
Someone carefully designed our new coffee pot. They tested it (we hope rigorously). They thought about how we would use it. They thought about how familiar we would be with it. They also thought carefully about their pots advantage (it’s bigger than most fish tanks) and how to communicate that to us, their target audience.
The web design process really isn’t too different.
Coffee pots and websites are both products designed to help people do something.
For Example:
Google: Designed to help us find something via the internet. (Cat videos).
Facebook: Designed to connect us.
Instagram: Designed to be the diary for our breakfast pictures and shameless selfies.
The coffee pot: Designed to make the coffee for us to love.
The all have goals. The differences in successful companies is how go about meeting them. Their value is in how effectively they do. Some websites ask users to complete similar tasks, but have very different ideas about how to complete it best. Think Google+ and Facebook. Same goal, different way of trying to achieve the same goal.
Great web design is creating a website that helps your company meet its goals.
The Importance of Custom Web Design
Your company is really cool. You create something unique that solves a problem. You have worked hard to be better than your competition.
Custom websites take your unique product and encourage your customers to complete your goal. Templates don’t do that. They are like the shelves and shelves of 12 cup coffee pots at Wal-Mart. The only thing that separates them is which one is on sale this week. If you want to help your audience discover how great your product is, choose the web design solution that enables that.
Keep drinking coffee and consider stopping by the Mango and saying hi.
PS: We also love tea!