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Graphics or Coding: Which is more important to a website’s success?

It’s kind of a funny topic to touch on because it really depends or your views on programming and graphic development and which to place greater value on. Some people like to go and spend their budget on graphics and others want to worry more about the functionality that the customer sees when using the site. I recently wrote an article about how some “Ugly sites” actually attract greater profits over time simply because for the most part they are functionally sound.

Pro-Graphics Support

Many business owners place a greater value on graphic development because they think “this is what my customer is going to see that is going to make or break the sale” and depending on the business they may very well be correct.

Perhaps it could also be related to a perception that because graphics are elements that are “seen” rather then coding elements which are “felt” by the customer that they are of more importance to the end goal of a given company. If you think about how many businesses are willing to go out and spend money on elements such as advertisements (Print), business cards, logos, brochures, graphic websites, etc then this seems to be a pretty large camp of business owners. Why is that? My personal belief on that is because these visual elements are aiding in the marketing of a company far more then coding or programming ever will merits the spending of business dollars over spending on fixing programming problems with a given site.

Pro-Programming Support

People and especially business owners are waking up the thought that perhaps pretty graphics aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Sure they look great and serve a purpose but how do they help your customer?

Programming on the other hand allow savvy business owners to work in greater cohesion with the applications and systems that run their businesses and rewards them better with higher profits then graphics ever could, more free time to spend doing other things and a sense that they have differentiated themselves from their competition that are slow to catch up. Whatever the case may be business owners and especially small business owners are becoming more responsive to programming being able to give them these things.

A few years ago when I was developing websites independently most people just wanted the sites with the pretty graphics and at most a form on the contact page of their site but today people are using out-of the-box software to help them develop their sites and getting programmers to help them develop their businesses custom system off of a base architecture like osCommerce or X-Cart or Joomla. It really is quite a change from what I’ve seen in the past. I see a lot more people needing help with these systems into the future because after all, not everyone is a programmer or has the time to develop an application to run their business.

Today Modules are all the rage and the next big step for web development is to integrate all those applications you use into one interface because lets face it, logging into 10 different applications is clumsy and time-consuming. Just something to think about J

Luc

Web Prophet