A couple of days ago, I met up with a friend. He had a website which he wanted me help him with.

Then, he told me that the firm opposite his office is offering him a very cheap rate for web design… and if I could match his prices, he’d give the project to me.

Frankly, I really didn’t want to do the project. There is no point competing on price.

Here are some things professional web designers do which you probably won’t get at cheapo web designers.

#1. Great web design is TESTED design

The design works for any browser, any platform. If you are in the web design trade, you’d know that there are HTML standards, and not all browsers follow that standard. Internet Explorer, in particular, tries to be “one of its kind” and never fails to meddle things up. Unfortunately though, because IE ships with Windows, many people use IE.

Here are five browsers that good websites need to work well on.

  1. Internet Explorer
  2. Firefox
  3. Safari
  4. Chrome
  5. Opera

At bare minimum, your site should not be all messed up in the latest versions of each of these browsers. At best, it needs to look exactly the same on every browser, with legacy versions (1 or 2 versions back), on every platform.

#2 Great web design is OPTIMIZED design

While we have broadband connections everywhere now, it is still important that your page loads quickly. Images need to be optimized. File sizes need to be minimal.

For a start, here are two very simple guidelines:

  1. Photographs need to be JPEGs
  2. Graphics need to be in GIFs or PNGs. (Preferably PNGs for transparency)

How bad can things get? Here’s an example. Once I was doing a revamp of a website for a company. The contact page featured a map and a photograph of the building which the company was located.

The original web designer combined these two photos into one. Making a bigger graphic, and its was over 80KB in size. When I split up the two images, and optimized each accordingly (the map as a gif and photo as a JPG), the file sizes combined reduced to less than 20KB. Imagine this one image loaded 500 times a day, 365 days a year… that is for ONE image.

How much bandwidth (and loading time) can you saved if you have 10 of such images?

#3. Great web design is USABLE design

The concepts behind usability are really common sense, but common sense are not common. But web usability does affect your ROI. Smacking a huge and useless image on the first fold of your webpage makes it look pretty, but it does not help the reader much.

These are teeny weeny little things that make great websites great. Some people may argue that the time spent is not worthwhile… but if you look at your web stats, you might be amazed how many people you might be “turning off” with these little things not fixed.