We’ve always believed that simple website are better, but now there is a host of evidence to back –up the intuition. Over this and the next few posts, we’re going to explore: mental prototypes, cognitive fluency, visual processing and working memory – and how all those things affect your web design.

So, what are mental prototypes when they’re at home?

A prototype is a basic mental image your mind holds to represent a particular type of thing.

For example, most people when asked to visualise a bird will have an image of a robin in their brain. The more a bird differentiates from this ‘prototype’, the less ‘birdy’ we consider it to be – for example penguins and ostriches are not considered as birdy as sparrows.

The same goes for fruit (apples), furniture (chairs) and websites.

Using mental prototypes helps us make sense of the world in a practical, efficient manner, so we don’t have to fully analyse everything we come into contact with each time. Otherwise, we would constantly be paralysed with trying to process everything we saw.

The reason this is important for web designers to know is that as result of prototypes, your brain likes things it is comfortable with, and will subconsciously reject things that deviate from the norm.

So most people will have a vague visual image in mind when it comes to a website for a plumber or a trendy shoe store, built up from all of those they have seen previously, and they will ‘want’ such websites to match these visual images.

Some designers and business people think it’s a good idea to be innovative and ‘stand out from the crowd’. This is certainly true in principle, but not if it’s just for the sake of being different. Because if your website is too different from what people expect, then they will find it strange and unsettling. This is unlikely to result in sales and enquiries for you…

So if your website has users hunting around for the navigation or looks like something out of the future, they won’t be sitting there admiring your innovation and cutting edge styling, they will be wondering why the website is so ‘wrong’.

So, by all means, be original and make an impact, but make sure you know what the prototypes for your area are, and that you’re using them to your advantage.

For more analysis, we recommend this excellent article, which was the inspiration for this series of posts: http://conversionxl.com/why-simple-websites-are-scientifically-better

If you found this article helpful and want to learn about good web design and bad web design, then have a look at our resource bank.

Everything on the Internet is free – right? Why should you pay for anything?

Whether you subscribe to that viewpoint or not, if you decide you or your company needs a website, there’s a good chance you’ll end up baffled as to what a reasonable amount to spend on a website is.

Some companies seem to be offering all the bells and whistles for under £100, while you hear rumours that some of the big brands paid millions for their websites.

As with most things, it mostly comes down to ‘you get what you pay for’ with a little wariness needed in order to avoid getting ripped off. 

Here is our brief guide to what we think is a reasonable charge for web design, from amateur to professional, and why:

Dirt Cheap / Free websites (under £100)

You can get a website dirt cheap or even free. There’s no doubt about it. There are do it yourself sites such as Squarespace and Wordpress which claim that you don’t need any technical expertise, and there are even designers who will promise you a wonderful website for only £100 or even less.

If you really absolutely, genuinely have no money at all, then this is the only option to you, so you must take it, because you have no choice. However, if you are starting a business, then creating a dirt cheap website could actually do the new business harm.

This is because a cheap website usually looks cheap, and the website reflects your business. Potential customers will assume that if your website is shoddy, your services and products will be to.

So why isn’t £100 enough for a decent website? Let’s break it down. A reasonable charge for a skilled professional is about £20 per hour. Let’s say they’re going even lower than that and only charging £15 per hour. That gives them about 6 and a half hours to build your site. And these are the absolute minimum things they need to do:

·         Select and register the domain name

·         Find out what you want

·         Create a design

·         Build the design

·         Insert the content

·         Make any final tweaks

·         Carry out SEO work

·         Launch the site

6 and a half hours only allows about 45 minutes per item on this list, and that’s not including any communication time. What sort of design can anyone do in 45 minutes?

No, unfortunately, anyone building a website for under £100 must be either working at below minimum wage, or cutting corners right left and centre.

Low priced websites (£500 - £1000)

If you’re on a budget, then £500 to a £1000 can buy you enough of a professional’s time to build a fairly decent, simple brochure website. 

This gives the designer time to do proper research and spend time brainstorming a good design that really reflects your vision of the business. They would have time to do the following:

•                    Communicate with you throughout the process

•                    Research, select and register the domain name

•                    Personal consultation to understand your business

•                    Research concepts and competitors

•                    Create a design

•                    Rework design concept to your perfect vision

•                    Find or create graphical imagery

•                    Build the design

•                    Integrate social media

•                    Insert interactive widgets

•                    Insert the content

•                    Do detail adjustment to perfect the content

•                    Make any final tweaks

•                    Carry out SEO work

•                    Launch the site 

This is likely to result in you having an attractive, well-functioning website that gives a good impression to visitors and encourages them to get in contact to find out more about your products and services. You should have enough room to explain what you do in good detail, include enough content to keep customers and Google happy and the resources to create vibrant, high quality imagery to engage your audience.

Medium priced websites £1000 - £10,000

If you have a bit more of a budget available, it means that you can get more expertise involved and create something a little more special. With this kind of budget you can start to include elements that will really lift your site above the competition.

With more time and resources, a web designer or web design team will be able to look at nifty interactive elements and will have the time it takes to ensure they work across all platforms (or degrade elegantly on those that don’t support it).

They will be able to create mobile friendly versions of the design and test responsive designs across a range of platforms to iron out any kinks.

They will probably be able to get more involved in branding and social media, and promotional elements such as photography and web videos.

A basic ecommerce solution is likely to fall into this band, because of the additional technical complexity of running a reliable, robust database. Ecommerce stores also come with a lot of functionality and features, all of which have to be developed and tested. However, if you want something very bespoke for your ecommerce store, you’re probably looking at the next band up.

Enterprise level web design and development: £10,000 – £50,000

If you’re getting into this kind of money you’re probably looking at bespoke web applications and web development. 

A basic text and image based website shouldn’t need to cost this much, no matter how many pages there are  - unless the designer is also supplying the content, or unless a lot of this budget is intended to go on post-launch marketing.

Within this band you could look at getting an interactive site that customers can use for something more than just reading text and may even pay just for the privilege of using. Customers may have their own accounts, which allow them to view and manipulate data.

The reason this band starts to cost a lot more is that for more complicated websites you need software developers as well as web designers. These jobs are more technically skilled and therefore there is a much higher barrier to entry, and this means they command a higher salary. Beware of using cheap developers as they are unlikely to really know what they’re doing (and are quite likely to be self-taught without the fundamental underlying knowledge), and you won’t find that out until you’ve forked out a bunch of money and found yourself left with a spaghetti mess of code that no decent developer will touch with a barge pole. 

£50,000+

Of course you can spend as much as you like when it comes to websites and web applications, and the price will climb the more features and functionality you need to put in. However, once you get into the £50,000+ mark, you’re looking more at bespoke web development than just a simple website – and that’s a whole different article!

So what is bespoke software? Well, it's software that's written specifically for your individual needs.

So when John is carefully cataloguing cartoon cats he decides to store specific details such as artists, dates, publication histories and graphic styles. He starts off putting all the images in a folder and then listing the cats on a spreadsheet with all the details on the rows. This quickly gets cumbersome and fiddly.

Bespoke software can provide an easy interface for him to browse through all the cartoons and add comments and associations between them. Garfield is orange, so is Heathcliff, let's associate them with the "both Orange" link. Suddenly navigating his collection is easy.

John realizes that he's spending hours just looking through the pictures and assigning them to the right group. The solution? Software to pattern match against existing known cartoons and predict the group. It's like facial recognition for felines. Oh, that one's Top Cat, put it in the Cats with Hats group.

Why get bespoke software?

'I don't need to automatically sort images of cats; everything I need to do I can do on my standard Office software.'

Yes, that's probably true; most people don't need cat recognition and most of the time the off the shelf software does a good job of handling common day to day activities. This is because most day to day activities in the business world are pretty generic. However, that's not to say you don't need bespoke software.

Bespoke software can speed up your daily tasks by automating the routine elements unique to your business processes. This leaves you more time to get on with the important task of generating wealth.

Bespoke software can reduce errors, omissions, and accidental duplication by validating data entry, prompting for required information and standardizing the capturing and reporting of data.

Bespoke software is actually pretty nifty.

Do I need bespoke software?

'How can I tell if I would get enough benefit from a bespoke software solution to justify the cost?'

Well, the best way is to look at the way your current business processes flow. Many small businesses handle a lot of their data on spreadsheets. In fact, pretty much anything can be done on a standard spreadsheet. They get used for task lists, invoices, sales reports, profit calculations, stock control, customer management and timesheets.

The trouble is that this can end up getting a little tangled and you end up with a system that takes five minutes to add a new order in a fiddly sheet with too many columns. Occasionally a formula gets accidentally deleted or copying from a word processor messes up all the formatting and it takes half a day to straighten it out. If this happens in your company, you could probably do with something more elegant which solves these issues. This may be a whole bespoke software solution or it may be a little widget that helps you use the tools you already have in a more efficient way.

Bespoke software is a key component of process improvement that, used correctly, can make your company more efficient, more reliable and ultimately, more profitable.

More features = better, right? Wrong.

We've always been frustrated by the reverence in which many people hold complexity. Give someone a planning or proposal document with a lot of mysterious codes, references and jargon on the front and they'll assume whoever made it must really know what they're talking about. Same goes for software. Ensure the interface is jammed with buttons and options and they can be sure they've got a top quality programme here.

We heartily disagree. What makes a document or programme effective is achieving its primary purpose reliably and without distraction. The bumpf at the beginning of a document distracts and confuses, and fails to get across any constructive information. At best it wastes time (and I don't know about you, but my time is precious and I don't appreciate it being wasted without my consent - or at least a bribe) and at worst it makes whatever follows harder to understand and digest.

With software the same thing happens, but on a larger, more destructive scale. We've heard numerous examples of people who look at a programme - which has been bought or even built specifically in order to make some of their everyday tasks easier and faster - and refuse to use it. Why? Because they're afraid of it. It looks too daunting with all those buttons and options - what if they do something wrong? And they're sure they'd never be able to work it out anyway.

Programmes should be streamlined before being feature rich, and features should be designed into the interface that makes the most common tasks unmissable, and the extra options tucked away only for those with the strength of heart and inclination to find them.

To read more on less is more being applied to technology, visit:

http://www.economist.com/node/16321516?story_id=16321516&source=hptextfeature