Steve Jobs stated once that the “design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

A good design shows functionality that goes beyond its appealing look.

It’s a lot like a packaging design for a product.

The primary goal is to attract the customer’s attention.

However, a good design goes beyond just informing the customer, it provokes a feeling and creates an emotion.

An effective packaging design looks attractive, impressive, and has enough creativity in it that you will purchase it just to stick it on a shelf.

A web design looks and operates the same way. It’s about the fonts, the message, the pictures and the look and feel.
How important is a packaging design?

Take a look at some of the packages below and you tell me and keep in mind that a web design works the same way.

To make the most out of a unique website design, you have to provide your designers with the information that they will need to understand your business. Thus armed, they can begin work on your new site with an eye to not only making it stand out, but also emphasizing your strongest suits and making those stick in your customers’ minds. But what are you supposed to look for in a unique website? What features and functions will serve best to not only enhance your site, but also build your brand?

The site’s appearance is going to be important, in large part because this will begin to establish the appearance of your brand. A logo might be the most important detail, but consider other images and colors that represent your business. Remember, you’re going to want to use these things for more than just your website, so the better they look and the more cohesively they fit together, the better. Consider asking for vector images, as these can be easily resized to fit anything from a business card to a website to a billboard. And while your graphics and colors should represent your business, they should also communicate its value. Remember that images and colors are often interpreted symbolically, perhaps on a subconscious level. So you want your designer to provide you with symbols of those things that your business provides: quality, service, affordability, or whatever other edge you have over your competitors.

The layout, navigation, and functionality of the site can also have an impact. Areas of your site that draw the most attention are going to be the most likely visited. A potential customer is not going to read through your entire website, thoughtfully digest the information, compare it with the next ten sites on whatever search engine it is using, and then make a fully informed, perfectly rational decision about which company to choose. If you’re lucky, it might skim the text on your home page, and quickly look around for key features or advantages that it feels are most useful or important. Your web designer should set up your layout and navigation scheme so that a customer can quickly determine the key reasons for choosing you.

But this does not mean you should ignore text entirely. A website is a repository of information, and unique websites are no exception. Not only is text content important to the search engines, but an interested visitor is likely to read (or at least skim) information you provide on whichever product, service, or feature attracted its attention in the first place. Even if you have a title and header and big flashy banner saying that you offer excellent customer service, for example, you need to provide a bit of information (policies, testimonials, etc) to back it up.

Creating a unique website design requires input from the business owner as well as creativity on the part of the designers. Once you have provided the information, you should expect results that not only make your website stand out visually, but that also emphasize the greatest advantages of choosing your business over your competitors. If you provide your designers with the information they need, and the freedom to mold that into the perfect website for your business, a unique website design will be what you get.

Copyright © 2008 Dustin Schwerman.

Dustin Schwerman is the primary web designer at Truly Unique – Small Business Website Design. Truly Unique specializes in impressive, custom sites designed to capture the essence of the businesses they represent, as well as creating useful web-based programs to improve and simplify some of the tasks of running a business. Their goal is to provide these services at affordable, pragmatic rates based on effort involved, rather than arbitrary costs based on number of pages or hours. Truly Unique works on sites of all varieties, from office supply to awards and trophies.