Web design, and what the money buys

Web design is paid for as a look and delivered as a set of decisions. The money buys the decisions: who the page is for, what they are holding, and the one thing they should do next.

For Quadomania, a quad-tour operator in Žabljak, the visitor is a tourist with a free afternoon comparing two operators on a phone. So the video at the top stayed vertical, 720 pixels wide and 1,280 tall, the nine photos below it are the same shape, and booking hands off to WhatsApp or Viber with the tour, date and number of riders already written in. Nothing asks for a card.

The look comes from rules written down before the work starts. This studio's rules live in a file the tools read before they design anything. One asks for one hero per screen, a single saturated element on a neutral field, because when two things glow nothing glows. Another says an ornament that carries no information gets cut, however good it looks.

A website, landing page or web shop starts at 900 euros. The files belong to the client at the end, so the design outlasts whoever maintains the site later.

Why the rules are written down at all is in Why I wrote my taste down, and the web design work is on the web design page.