Ok ad agencies, if you’re going to do web design work, know your medium
So I started working on some revisions to a site design for one of our major brands that is going through an overhaul. They’ve contracted with a local ad agency to come up with the new creative and messaging. The agency took a couple cuts at the website that were quite laughable. It was very clear that whoever put the design together was coming from a print background, the work showed a clear lack of understanding for usability - even if they were given a the directive of “think outside the box”. The “feel” they put together was cool, just the execution as a site design was not practicle, usable or SEO friendly.
So a couple weeks ago myself and one of our other developers sat down with the marketing manager for this business unit and outlined what we’d do different to their design to make it “work”. The meeting was great, we had about 4 sheets of paper folded up and torn so the appropriate parts of each were visible. She got a copy of the working files from the ad agency, and tonight I sat down to actually put some of those changes into a real file
So I go in and open the files… not only are they set to be like 10.5×10.2 inches, but they are set to 150dpi. WTF? I realize that they were probably thinking they needed to have something to mount up for presentation, but man they knew it was for the website 72dpi printed would have been fine. Besides that, were they going to charge us when we told them we needed the files at 72dpi instead of their 150?
I can understand if their in house people don’t know what is good or bad from an SEO perspective, it’s still a mystery to many. And I can somewhat handle the design approach, but I can’t understand logo’s at the bottom of pages, page’s who’s height would have meant the logo would have been “below the fold” (although I think I’m past the myth of the fold), I can’t understand not having a navigation system designed that can handle the 70+ pages (w/up to 4 levels of nav) the current version of the site has, and I really can’t understand trying to put pop out navigation coming in horizontally from the sites of a page. Sheesh. Steve Krug would have had a conniption if he’d seen it (btw - I’ve never seen the work conniption spelled before now).