Why You Can’t Compromise On Web Design
Lawmakers are required to compromise because they work in complicated affairs where “what’s best” is extraordinarily hard to determine. How’s anyone supposed to know the best choice for a nation of 300 million that constantly reinvents itself? Compromise is normal. Agreement is rare.
Fortunately, small business web design is not government. The writers, designers and other experts who make websites can’t compromise with anyone.
Why Businesses Hire Experts
Small business owners hire expert consultants to fill in knowledge gaps. If you can design and configure your own website, save the money and do it yourself. The tools are all online and mostly free. However, many business owners don’t want to do it themselves. Instead they hire the best expert for the money to make the best choices for them.
In web design, this means the designer talks with you about your needs and wants. Special attention is paid to your target audience and what they want. IT, marketing and graphic design experts should be in this meeting too.
After agreeing on strategy and goals for your site, the web designer produces mockups or samples of various options. The point of these options is to give you freedom to select from several excellent choices. The next step involves exchanging ideas, testing them and offering feedback on the in-progress web design. This goes on until you and the expert designer reach an agreement on the best website for your business.
At least that’s the idea. It almost never goes that well. We’ll get to why in a moment.
During the web design process, it’s important for you to have ideas and a vision for your own website. Don’t be surprised when a web designer shoots some of those dreams right out of the sky. Why? That’s what you hired the expert for.
Why Experts Say No
If you make a request or express an idea to your web designer, they might say no.
They might say no because the idea contradicts your mission statement. They might say no because your request is beyond their expertise. They might say no because your budget is too small. Experts say no because they understand the needs, wants and constraints of your project. They don’t say no without a good reason.
This is why there’s no compromise with an expert like your web designer. When they say yes, it’s because their expertise agrees with you. When they say no, it’s because it doesn’t.
If your idea is not what is best for you, it’s the expert web designer’s job to persuade you otherwise. Here’s the trick: let what experts think is best become what you think is best. After all, you hire an expert so you can trust your project to someone who knows better than you. Trust your expert- they’ll thank you.
Why Compromise Kills
Should you find yourself in a compromise situation with your web designer, reevaluate the situation.
Compromise picks the lesser of two evils. It happens when your web designer can’t persuade you their idea is better or recognize when yours is. It happens when neither you nor your web designer is an expert in web design. When no one knows what they’re doing, the end product will always be a joke.
If you compromise with an expert, then something’s deeply wrong. Your project is bleeding from internal wounds like these:
- Distrust – when your expert has failed (or you think they’ve failed) and you try to reclaim the throne you pay the expert to sit on.
- Ego – when you only trust yourself. An ego problem means you can’t accept anyone’s expertise but yours. A good web designer fires their own clients when ego is an issue.
- Ignorance – when your expert is not an expert and nobody’s idea is the best. So you pick one of the inferior options, some combination of the two or nothing as a compromise.
- Apathy – when your expert gives in to your bad idea because they don’t care about you.
Why would you pay someone who doesn’t know enough about their service, doesn’t care about your project or who you don’t trust? Why would an expert hang on to a client who can’t trust them?
Check out Andy Rutledge’s thoughts on compromise for a deeper study of these problems.
A healthy relationship with your web designer – or any expert – is defined by collaboration and agreement. Offer your own ideas and listen to your expert’s. Develop new ideas based on the previous ones. Let the expert pick the best ideas and make them realities. Let them tell you no.
If you can’t agree, then get out quick. Compromise has a place, but not in your business.
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