The Temecula Web Design Landscape

How to tell the Web Site Design Pros from the Website Design Posers in the Temecula Valley

The Top 10 Clues for avoiding ineffective Temecula Website Designer choices

Hint #1: Obvious, Unaltered Stock Images

The Internet has a host of stock image libraries for web designers to utilize in creating your website. The upside to such a readily available supply of generic Graphic Designs and Photography (necessary components of a web design, no doubt), is that they were likely created by Graphic Designers and Photographers with enough talent and expertise to warrant their work getting included in the library of available images for sale. This availabilty alone can save an otherwise less than talented web designer's bacon. Of course, these Graphic Designs and these Photographic images are very affordable, and do provide a convenient means for making a few bucks for an otherwise underexposed artist. But, the inescapable fact remains: A Web Design with Unaltered, Generic, Stock content looks like a Web Design with Unaltered, Generic, Stock content. Which, of course, is so fake that it's uncomfortable. The Solution: You want a professional Web Designer who takes the time to insist that the unique nature of you and your business or organization are accurately, cleverly, professionally, rewardingly, memorably reflected in the Graphic Design and Photography that appears on your website. And that means professional, custom work, or, at the very least, an adequate level of skill at customizing stock content to make it uniquely your own.

Hint #2: A Website Portfolio of Repeatedly Rigid Layouts

Welcome to Website World! Where every Web Design is an infinite variety of Rectangular Real Estate. Thankfully, the landsape of Temecula and the Temecula Valley, as well as almost all of San Diego's North County, Southwest Riverside County, the Inland Empire, and, really, Southern California as a whole, is a tapestry of rolling hills and curvaceous roads, making each home unique in terms of its own Footprint and its own view. You'd think that might inspire some Web Design crews to produce something other than the Box Farms that they pump out, but, apparently, they can only think in terms of Rigidly oriented Perpendicular space. As if the topography of life were a locked model of a Crossword Puzzle. Come on, fellaz...let's go, ladiez...let's do some thinking Out of the Box.

Hint #3: Web Designs that Require Work

Maybe it's the Expediency vs Service dilemma. I like it when I go to the grocery store and I can actually find someone to help me find what I'm looking for. I like it when I get to speak to a person behind the counter. It helps me realize I'm part of a community, and not just a Capitalist Fish to be baited or, worse yet, farmed! I like that my bank doesn't try to corner me into only interfacing with a machine. Love that smiling lady behind the counter! Want me to eat at your restaurant? We want "Happy to serve you, Sir," rather than "Serve yourself and don't forget to throw away your landfill's worth of polystyrene refuse when you're through!" And this goes triple for Web Site Designs. Don't show me a Website with a Drop Down menu as long as my kids Christmas Wishlist. Don't show me a web site design with as much content crammed onto the home page as the Temecula Farmers' Market.

Hint #4: Website Designs that are Impersonal

Don't tell me it's "Your Policy." Don't distance me with someone who doesn't have the authority to make decisions at "the local level." And don't design your Web Site so that it looks like there are no real, live, God-breathed, flawed human beings connected to the enterprise. Don't drop some slick sales pitch on me. I've seen it all before, and it comes across just as plasticene on a web page as it does with Snake Oil, Used Cars, and Network News Teams. I want my web site design to emanate the essence of the fact that I knead my own bread dough. I want my web site design to somehow say that I know what it means to rack my knuckles on a radiator. And I want a web design that whispers that I'd rather rock my grandchildren to sleep while telling them stories about the inventions of Dirt and Running Water than take a free cruise to Alaska with the mayor of Temecula. How do you integrate this quality in to the design of a web site? You hire someone who will take the time to find out uniquely who you are and what the essential Nature of your endeavor happens to be. That takes the touch of a web designer who is partly a good personal investigator.

more to come...

Hint #5: Their Web Design Work is filled with Oceans of Text

Like a magic eye painting, there is so much text that, if you stare long enough, hidden images emerge!

Hint #6: Their Web Design Work has the catch-all Artistic Harmony of a Community Bulletin Board at the Local Laundr-o-mat

Hmmm...maybe that's what happens when one gives leave to a tech savvy but artistically unschooled SEO researcher to craft ones representative presence for all the cyber-world to survey.

Hint #7: Their idea of "Multi-Media" is a Website Design with both Silent and Stationary

It's the internet...not a cocktail napkin. If your website doesn't move, talk, interact, or make you get up and dance, then you're leaving your Lamorghini parked in your garage under a canvas car cover.

Hint #8: All of their Web Design work looks similarly bland and disinterested

I don't know...does that mean that, as Web Designers, they're unimaginative? Burned Out? Simply not interested in repeat business or referals?

Hint #9: Your Website is your On-Line Personality. But all of their Web Design work is completely Themeless and Vague.

Ok...maybe as Web Designers, they've learned to manage a color wheel. But being able to deliver an effective and appropriate theme...one with that edge takes Insight and Understanding...both craftiness and mastery of craft.

Hint #10: Their Portfolio of Web Design and even their own Website sends the implied message: "We're in a Hurry! Just give us your money and get lost!"

Hey, look! We're Artists...We've mastered the art of grabbing cash.

Alternative, non-Flash Content Under Construction