Print and Web Design: What Are The Differences And Why It's Important To Design Differently For Web.

Print and Web Design: What Are The Differences And Why It's Important To Design Differently For Web.

While working as a web designer, I have many times noticed incredibly talented and fine artists, who while doing amazing job for print production, tried to design for web with very little knowledge on the technology, computer-human interaction, usability, and many other important things that distinguish web product from print one. I can't stress it enough - everyone in the world has to admit once and forever: Web and print design concepts are as different as night and day, man and woman, wet and dry, or Mac and PC.

Well, I may be too strong towards PC, but I am allowed to make a little joke once in a while.

I believe that only Web Art Directors should create web project layouts, and this should become a rule. I hope with all my heart that this discipline will soon be taught in colleges. So far we are dealing with User Interface Designers, who are not necessarily Artists. That's why it’s pretty common when nicely looking websites sometimes are not usable, and very usable products don’t look so nice.

The situation has been turning around lately. But there are still lots of websites out there designed by print designers. And I don’t think that it is going to end nearly soon.

Below I am quoting my comment from a Website Critique section of MarketingProfs. The website owner was concerned if the website looks good, if the user is compelled to find the store (it looks like a game “Dare to find!”), if there was any awkward messaging.

Here is my answer to that request. Differences in Web and Print design and a shade more on his project:

First of all, I would say, that the design looks good. However, it’s also obvious, that it has been created by non-web designer, but by a print artist.

There is a huge difference between designing for print and for web. Print material could be delivered, carried, and read by your target audience at their convenient time. But you have to make your target audience to come to your website, and then to read the contents. Another difference is that print material could be carefully read from paper. That’s much more convenient and comfortable versus reading from the screen.

Design of a print product page is visible fully right away, and the design concept can be taken and perceived by a human mind at once. Web design elements appear to website users consequently as they are viewing the site. Depending on lots of variables such as the amount of content, internet connection speed, screen size and resolution, etc, sometimes even important content elements may not be visible right away.

There is a concept of cognitive load. Its value is crucial for interactive products and not so important for print product. When it comes to printed material, there is still time the user spends looking for important information. It’s dramatically smaller than when he’s trying to get to the information on a website.

Print product is scanned visually in order to find information a reader is looking for. Users read website using hand when moving a mouse from object to object. The difference between the sight reaction and a movement is quite different and proportional to cognitive load of the project: the longer time user requires to find information he needs, the bigger cognitive load is. And unfortunately cognitive load is inversely proportional to usability of your project. The longer time user needs to find what he is looking for, the bigger chance that he either forgets what he was doing or leaves the website.

That is why even nice and clean design which works perfectly for print products may not be considered usable for web products. That is why it’s so important to approach the creation of a website knowing those important concepts: cognitive load, human computer interaction, etc. Print design is coming from good looks, web design is coming from the content.

Let’s start from scratch and define what is the most important part of your website’s content. I assume it’s your products, company name, slogan or short description of what your company does, AND contact information.

You have an online store, so your first rule should be placing your products (all or the most popular) available for purchase right on the first page. You would say, you did that, but I would say you didn’t. Users have to make three (!) clicks before they get to the page where they can actually buy something. Menu is unintelligible, it’s not constant from page to page. The information on your company is in the very end of the page, there is huge blank space next to the logo on the index page, and below you only can see a very big banner, which barely represents your company.

There’s a huge news column, which is in fact useless, because before people know who you are, they have no desire to read your news. News is ok, but you could use that space for placing your products in there. In fact, your index page should have looked more like this: http://store.ipevo.com/, but the banner is still huge, and again useless: it’s obvious that you are in online store as you can see prices and “add to cart” buttons.

I can add much more about visual consistency, wrongly cut initial design (it’s when a Photoshop layout is cut into small elements). For example, this image: http://www.ipevo.com/images/navigation_free1.jpg had no right to look like this. Instead, it had to be cut into smaller pieces with text coded as text. Neither should the main banner have looked the way it does. I mean this image: http://www.ipevo.com/images/indexbanner_0312.jpg I see at least 5 elements in this banner.

Needless to say that even though you have some meta tags in place, other basic search engine optimization is not conducted. There is this poor image (http://www.ipevo.com/images/home4.jpg) which not only is huge, it contains all important information about your product. Search engines could have indexed text from this image; instead you have hidden it inside of graphics and didn’t even use an “alt” parameter… It’s like you are saying: “Look, it’s s nice company, but we really don’t want anyone to buy anything, because you’ll never find us!” Frankly, it’s not funny.

My summary is: great start, you have a nicely drawn image, now get yourself a professional WEB designer, who will adjust this image and create a professional web site, which will actually attract customers to buy your product.

Here's another interesting article on Web Design vs Print Design: Differences Between Print Design and Web Design by Jakob Nielsen

How much should I charge for the advertising on my website?

A while ago I have answered a question on MarketingProfs about how to evaluate a website as an advertising platform and how much to charge for advertising.

William Leonard is asking:

We're launching a social networking website aimed at a particular group. We want to sell advertising sponsorships to selected non profits or other groups that will want to get their message out to our members.

Our issue is How much do we charge the sponsor?


Well, technically the price of advertising at your website is relatively easy to calculate. But first let me tell you something. It absolutely does not matter how you evaluate your website as an advertising platform. If you're only launching your site, I hazard a guess that you have to promote it first just to make sure that the group you are aimed at does really visit your website. After completing marketing surveys of your actual visitors (which you will be able to do properly after several months of actual and active life of your newly created web-project using for example daily polls) you will get a foretaste of your users profile types. Only after you conduct this research you may start offering paid advertising based on what your visitors want to read or what kind of advertising they want to accept.

I am sorry to say that, but before you even launch the project you can't offer any serious advertising. At this point all advertising you can offer without misinforming your sponsors are free kinds of ads plus, may be, some paid campaigns which will be supported by aggressive promotion of your own website on the net.

I don't want to disappoint you, but you may offer $50 per 50 clicks from your site to the sponsor's one, But I assure you, until your site starts generating thousands visits per day, it's a fantasy that you will earn your 50 bucks within even months.

Just go ahead, promote yourself, do everything to appear in the first ten search results in Yahoo and Google, get to the point of at least couple hundreds visitors per day - and then sell yourself.