Website as Art: Form or Function? What is the Purpose of the Website for Your Consulting Practice?

“Build Gorgeous Websites” says an advertisement from Wix.com, a recent entry in the website development tools arena. This notion of website as art is also reinforced by a cottage industry of web designers who would like to spend your money to build one for you. Is this really the right way to think about your website ?

What did one of the greatest designers of the century have to say about the topic ?    

"Design is not what it looks like or feels like. Design is how it works."   Steve Jobs.

How is a website suppose to work ?  The primary purpose of a website is to facilitate the sales and marketing function of the enterprise. As such, a website has several critical functional roles:

1. Communicate Basic Business Information:
1. value statement to the customer
2. location, contact information
3. working hours and preferred communication mechanism
4. background information which engenders trust and “thought leadership”
2. Customer Engagement: eCommerce for products and services
1. scheduling of interaction between clients/company
2. update of consumer specific information
3. analytics which help understand customer behavior
3. Front-End of Business Operations
1. coherence point for client contact information
2. coherence point for sales information
3. front-end for database to drive future marketing/sales initiatives

For any website, form must follow function. For example, building an artistic website with a high degree of graphical content which cannot be consumed by search engines is not very productive. However, personalizing with appealing content above a clean functional infrastructure can be very powerful.

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