I know what you’re thinking… “Hey Tony, you work in this industry right? Are you crazy?”

Like a fox 😉

A couple of years ago, I was reading the tea leaves and what they told me was highly designed and customized websites were on a death march. If you’re in the industry, you most likely know where I’m going with this. If not, welcome to the world of the wild and wonderful web.

Mercenary Numero Uno:
Mobile Devices

As mobile devices become our go-to device, the desktop/laptop browsers become less used, a trend that continues to sky rocket today. The perfectly shaded shadows, well placed textures, elegant and interactive user experience, and design elements that added depth to your page — are no more, gone, sayonara, ma’salama, hasta lavista baby.

The focus was turned to great fonts (thank you google.com/fonts), better use of negative/white space, fast loading which meant less of the cool textures and shadows (they don’t render so well on a tiny phone screen), high contrast, and minimizing the design portion.

Asesino Numero Dos (that’s #2 to the gringos)
Templates, Themes, & DIY

The growth of WordPress themes and DIY website sites like Wix, Weebly, and SquareSpace have indeed had a huge impact on the industry. They’ve made it pretty simple to create a site for whatever crazy idea you may have or service you want to promote; you may run into several or dozens of other sites out there that look just like yours, but you’ll have something on the cheap using your own brain, fingers, and eyes.

The problem is: YOU should not be building your site. You do what you do and you do it well. What you don’t do is layout websites. You don’t choose color palettes easily. You don’t know how to best present your content for a pleasant viewer experience. You struggle over what font to use. There’s lots of things you don’t know and in the immortal words of Don Rumsfeld… “There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” 

 

Ditch the Wix, Return to the Pros

What I’m seeing today is that entrepreneurs, admins, athletes, artists, etc. do not want to spend their time designing and building their sites while trying to catch Colbert on the late night. The tools and templates aren’t as easy and intuitive to your casual web user, accountant, dentist; you know where I’m going with this.

They find themselves annoyed and stressed while trying the DIY route. It’s not as intuitive as it seems either, trust me, I’ve built a few sites with a variety of the tools out there and I was still confused at times. If I’m confused, I know darn well that the average end user is cussing up a storm, downing their favorite wine, and pulling hair out.

If your frustration level has peaked and you’re ready for the pros once again, we welcome you with warm creative hearts.