Transitioning Your Printed Materials to the Web – Part 5: Don’t Go Overboard

photo credit: popculturegeek.com - "Hey baby, I'm a website. Check me out! I'm totally pimped to the max with animated graphics, starburst effects, page wipes and text so bright you can't even read it! Cost me almost as much as my gold tooth!"

By Matt Cook
Point Click Media

The following is Part 5 of our series on transitioning your business materials to the web. To review the past articles visit the following links:

Part 1: Layouts
Part 2: Images, Resolution & Color Profiling
Part 3: Web Safe Fonts
Part 4: Dealing With Navigation

Over the past 5 weeks we’ve taken you through some of the thought process that goes into taking printed materials and bringing them to the web. Now that you understand some of the challenges that web designers and developers have to face and some of the limitations that the web imposes in different areas, it’s important not to go overboard in trying to make up for certain shortcomings.

Make no mistake, the web is one of the best marketing tools at your disposal. But just because you CAN do just about anything you want with your website, doesn’t mean you SHOULD or HAVE to. Often, businesses see the web as an opportunity to really clang the bells and toot the whistles with all kind of flashy gimmicks and animated graphics to fill out their websites. While effective if used properly, animation serves a functional purpose to enhance web content and not necessarily to turn your website into the command center of the Star Ship Enterprise. You stand a much better chance of winning over your audience by keeping it tasteful. It’s kind of like those fashion models who drone out along the runway wearing an outrageously designed $200,000 gown made of recycled car batteries. After the shock value (no pun intended), there’s really not much use for it.

Remember that your content is what people come for. A great website shouldn’t have to rely on such extreme tactics to get the point across. By utilizing some of these ideas that we’ve brought forth during this series, it’s our hope that your designs will be easily adaptable to the web. Just keep in mind that for all the technological restrictions that the internet may have, it’s still very flexible. No matter what your design problem may be there is likely a solution for it.

If you’re having problems translating some of your printed materials to the web, Point Click Media can help with providing feedback and recommendations on getting the job done right.

This concludes our 5 part series on transitioning your printed materials to the web.