When good isn’t good enough

Having launched my site at www.theworkof.co.uk, I find myself questioning its ability to display my artwork in the best possible way. I don’t believe that the site entices people to look closer at the work displayed on there because of its over-simplistic design.

There are reasons why it’s designed the way it is, however. The main reason is because my previous design was difficult for a potential client to use. It took four clicks to actually get to a piece of artwork, which is unacceptable. With this new design, it takes one.

Secondly, it’s as simple as it is so that it’s easy to update. I don’t claim to be a web design guru. I wouldn’t call myself a beginner at site design by any means, but I’m certainly not a professional web designer. My work is very much print based. I don’t really deal with design for web.

For these two reasons and a few others, I decided to go with this design. However, now that it’s launched and I’ve recieved feedback from people on how it looks, the majority of its has unfortunately been negative. That’s not to say people have been unkind about it, but simply expressed a dislike of it. The work itself, people have said is great, but that the site is doing me no favours.

Like most designers, nothing is ever and will never be good enough. It will always need tweaking. It will always need an extra hour, day or week spent on it. My site design does the job, but doesn’t do it well enough. To this end, I’m considering a further redesign in order to better display the work.

In the meantime, I do believe that it at least gives me a chance to display my portfolio is a manner that is better than my previous design.

Unfortunately, because I have a lot of University comittments, the time I can spend on my site is quite small and so any further design work will be slow. However, since my website is the most important way of people finding me, I do believe it should be one of my priorities. I have until January 5th until I’m back at University. In an ideal world, I’d love to have it up and running by then, so that I can further promote it to potential clients and design agencies.

If you have any comments on the site, I’d love to hear them.