While i was looking through my websites statistics, i noticed someone had searched the sentence “how can i judge if a website is designed good” and somehow stumbled on my website. Now, I personally believe that this is a very important question that anyone who is seriously considering to develop a website should be asking.

First, let’s look at the basic concept of design.By designing something, what are we really doing?

We are:

• Sorting and Organising things
• Deciding the shape and colours of them
• Applying commonly used standards

These are just a few examples of what you do, when you design something. I’m not just talking about website design here but any kind of design.

Now, in order to identify a good design, one needs to be able to pay attention to detail (in fact, this is one of the more common criteria looked for when recruiting website designer by agencies). Whether you do have the ability to see things in detail is a whole different topic. Most commonly, I see people who have great ability to see details visually but don’t realise them, and then there are people who barely understand any of what they’re seeing and still think of themselves on an equal level of professional designers.

The biggest criteria for a good website design, is that it needs to be able to please as many people as possible. This is certainly not something that can be easily accomplished most of the time.

Let’s take Google as an example, if Google’s design had it not been so pleasant, we could’ve had a few more search engines today. Why do people like Google’s design when there’s barely any content or images on its home page? It’s super simple, yet super effective. When people get all excited about there website, the first thing that comes to there mind is “how do i make my website have a WOW effect” and they quickly conclude that they need very big images flying in from the left right and center. Well, that’s the wrong way to have a website designed. If I was a customer and I saw that on the homepage, I would quickly hit the back button of my browser and goto the next website on Google’s search results.

When you’re looking to get your website designed and developed, do some research on how your competitors websites look. Doing this will give your eyes some basic training required to understand what looks nice and what doesn’t. But remember, what you find boring can be beautiful to someone else, what you find exciting can be annoying to someone else. This is why it takes website designers several years to not only train their mental designing capability but to also train their eyes in recognising what works with certain website designs and what doesn’t.

My recommendation is, if you want to be a good judge at judging the quality of a website design, then you have to do the hard yards by doing the appropriate research. In any situation, I would recommend that you should leave the last word to your designer since they have most likely spent 1000’s more hours analysing every single website they come across on a day-to-day basis.