What web designers can learn from architects

Architecture is an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon mathematics, science, art, technology, social sciences, politics and history. That's quite a list of skills! However, architecture's been around for centuries, so it's had time to clearly define and formalize that list of skills.

Web design, on the other hand, has only been around about 15 years (the first widely-used web browser, Mosaic, was released in 1993). Web design is obviously a new, still-being defined discipline compared to traditional architecture. Being so young, the web design industry can learn a lot from architecture. Here's an example. According to Vitruvius, the earliest known architectural theorist, a good building should satisfy the following three principles:

• Durability - it should stand up robustly and remain in good condition.
• Utility - it should be useful and function well for the people using it.
• Beauty - it should delight people and raise their spirits

Those are also the attributes of a well-designed website. To build such a website, a web design firm needs many of the interdisciplinary skills of an architect. Specifically, it needs both technical and artistic skill-sets, and incorporate them into an integrated web design.

However, because there's still no universal, widely-recognized certification or degree for web design, the likelihood of one person having all those skills is fairly rare. And, based on how quickly web technologies evolve, that's not likely to change anytime soon. So a web design firm needs to have a team of professionals to span those skill-sets. 

At a minimum, a web design firm needs two professionals. One is a technologist, who understands topics such as networking, server- and client-side programming, database design, and testing. The other needs to be an artistic designer, who understands traditional topics such as graphic design, layout and content development (writing and editing), and how to implement them appropriately into websites. Either (preferably both), should also understand usability, search engine optimization, and technical restrictions inherent to different types of computers, screens and web browsers.  Both should work together to build a website that achieves their client's business needs: typically an online sale or "offline" follow-up with the web user that then leads to a sale.

Websites that aren't designed with both skill-sets are easy to recognize. Those designed with only artistic skills tend to be beautiful to humans, but invisible to search engines such as Google and have serious usability problems. Those designed with only technical skills tend to run well, but look amateurish, are poorly organized and have too many features. Neither the artistic- nor technical-only websites meet the client's business needs.

On the other hand, a well "architected" website fulfills both the technical and artistic requirements of a website that meets the client's business needs, which in turn leads to increased sales.

This article was originally published in the Coeur d'Alene Press' North Idaho Business Journal