How do you define quality on the web?

After contributing to a Twitter conversation about quality in the web development industry it got us thinking about how do people assess the quality of the work we produce?

There are 4 factors that play a part in a web project:

Customer Service

In service based industries customer service is viewed as being of paramount importance, with many businesses adopting the mantra ‘The customer is always right’. Yet while customer service can speak to the quality of the sales and management team within an agency it doesn’t guarantee the quality of a launched website.

Customer service can often take a knock if the client also thinks ‘The customer is always right’. As designers and developers we constantly question everything that comes in front of us, to the point of irritation. We don’t do this to be difficult we do it to collect information so that we can ensure the solutions we put in place are right for the client and their business.

Good Code

Clients have little awareness of the underlying code of a website, at least not until their website breaks or isn’t fast enough, anyway. Good code is an important part of any website but many who interact with a website are more concerned about the visual aspects of the website rather than its underlying structure.

But a developer will take a lot of pride in the code they produce, constantly looking to improve it; making it leaner, faster and more robust. All these refinements may not show in the website but they can reduce downtime, hacking attempts and increase search rankings.

Pretty Design

The aesthetic beauty of a website is often a metric of quality, looked upon in a similar way to Art or Fashion. And in a similar way web design can be swept along in the latest and emerging trends; Flat Design being one such trend recently.

Clients will often look to competitors as well as the web as a whole to judge their website in comparison to others. This can result in some clients wishing to mimic their competitors rather than create something more unique and potentially take a step forward from their competitors.

But how we view beauty is subjective, what one person finds visually appealing is not the same as the person sat next to them. Take for example Lings Cars. I can’t find much in this website that I would say is visually appealing. Yet to Ling who runs the website she must be very happy with the look of her website as she’s had ample time over the years to hire a web agency to redesign the website.

Good Design

But good design actually has nothing to do with how pretty a website is. Often an ugly website can be successful because the design allows the user to complete the tasks that are important to them. Alternatively a pretty design can fail as it hides functionality under various visual flourishes.

Though not an ugly website at all the current Gov.uk website is a great indication of good design instead of pretty design. The website has been designed so it is functional to as many of the 60 million people living in the UK as possible. There’s little in the website that exists purely to make the website pretty. Instead the design is invisible and allows the user to complete their goals as quickly and painlessly as possible.

It’s because pretty design is subjective, code is too technical and customer service doesn’t speak to the quality of an actual website that within Bronco our primary metric for quality is good design. Good design is quantifiable through improved sales, enquiries and awareness.

A bit of everything

But of course we don’t just do good design at the detriment of everything else. Not all websites can be Gov.uk and so have to be visual enticing to new customers and to visually distinguish themselves from their competitors.

We write quality code so that a website runs fast, ranks well in search engines and is more robust against breakages and hacks. Businesses take downtime very seriously and partnerships can spiral downwards in these instances.

Finally good customer service is about meeting the requirements of a client in a way that serves their customers. The customer might always be right but in the case of designing and building websites it’s not our client who is right but their customers who are right.

So while good design is incredibly important to us it is not the only factor we concern ourselves with. If we get all of these things right then we can build long lasting partnerships with our clients.

Through happy clients our reputation grows and the quality of our work and our service is communicated through them. Word of mouth has always been a very important marketing method as people trust the opinion of others and who they say is producing quality work.