For the purposes of this article we define design as: the specific details and elements that make up the look and feel of your website. You might call it the theme or the style of your site. The design is made up of the colors, shapes, sizes, typography, layouts, menus, and images that make up your website.

For most people (including most web designers and web agencies), web design is all about one thing and one thing only: design. In our experience, mistakenly assuming that design is the most important part of a web strategy is one of the leading causes of website failure.

We aren't suggesting that design is not important. Good design is one of the fundamental elements that will determine success. But the underlying concepts of how design influences success are frequently misunderstood. For example, you'll often find web designers quoting a six-year-old (maybe older?) Stanford University study that concludes that "nearly half of all consumers assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design". While that old dusty study is a nice reference guide with some good insights, it's almost always cited out of context.

People don't use Google, FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and Craigslist because those sites have award winning designs. In fact, rather than trying to find the right design, these top tier websites focus more on avoiding the wrong design.

Understanding the Role of Design

There's no way to get into everything you should know about good design here, but we want to cover some of the basic concepts:

• Design Conveys Personality
  Yes, it's true: websites have personalities. Understanding this can help you approach design with the right objectives. What kind of personality should your website have? What characteristics do you want to avoid? How can you use design to exploit your strengths and mask weaknesses?
• Design can Solve Problems or Create Problems
  The right design elements can contribute to good communication and conceptual flow on your website. The wrong design can create road blocks at every turn. Every element of design should be evaluated to determine its true impact.
• Design can be Objective
  It's not about individual or focus group opinions. What you like or what we like doesn't matter. A skilled designer can evaluate design based on sensible, common experiences that are perceptible by any attentive observer.
• Design is not the same as User Experience
  Design is intertwined into user experience through such factors as usability, performance, and device compatibility. But if you lump design and user experience into one, you'll often end up compromising in the wrong areas (often when a compromise isn't even necessary). Without a solid understanding of user experience this may be a little confusing. We'll get more into this when we discuss User Experience in future articles.

What you really need to know is that design plays an important role in strategy. But that role has much more to do with communication than it has to do with looking snazzy.

Bad Designer vs. Good Designer

Good designers and bad designers often have a lot in common. They can both be very artistic and creative. They may both be inspired and motivated; and both might have deep experience and skills. What separates the good from the bad is not usually how skilled they are at creating designs, but rather why they create a design.

Design Should Support (not Become) Your Strategy

As important as it is to understand how powerful design is in helping you meet your objectives-- it's even more important to know how limited its impact will be if you don't have a complete strategy.

The misconception that design is everything arises primarily because everything needs design. Navigation needs design. Content needs design. Usability needs design. Marketing needs design. It's easy to fall into the wrong mindset. You think, "Good navigation = good design", and, "good usability = good design." This puts sole focus in the wrong place (design).

Creating a great user experience requires so much more than design. It requires real strategy and lots of planning. If you think good design is your strategy, then you simply don't have a strategy.

It all comes back to designing for a purpose other than design itself. Design is something you should only be thinking about as it relates to specific problems and the solutions that make up your overall strategy.

Bottom Line: Design Really Matters

Success on the web can only happen if:

• You ensure that your design really supports the objectives of your business and your site visitors.
• You accept that design is just one component of smart web strategy.

While the title of this article is deceiving, we hope to have established that great design is critical. But great design only matters if you look at it from the right perspective.