Goals. Not Preferences.

If I could give you only one piece of advice, it would be that old Buddhist adage, ‘Know what you want.’ Most of my other tips are simply ways to re-word this concept. A site has a job to do. Maybe the site’s job is to be beautiful. OK, that’s fine. But I would suggest that for many of you, ‘beauty’ is not the goal. And yet, when most of us start talking about ‘design’, we immediately start talking about ‘the look’ or ‘the structure’, when what we should do first is make a list of goals; sort of a Top 10 List. Call it ‘What I want my new site to do for me.’ And then, keep checking back to that list over and over to make sure that every decision is geared towards achieving those goals.

This is not so easy.