Website design seems to be the one area where everyone feels comfortable with having an opinion, and making it known to all who will listen. After all, what better target for a subjective opinion than something you can see, put up on a screen, point at and judge before all the world! Nothing makes me cringe like half the people in the room saying a design is good and the other half saying it is bad …where do you go from there?

With good processes in place, a website design should be a natural progression of a project life cycle. After you have completed the discovery meetings, IA, competitive research, etc. the design should just happen, right? One would hope. However, as any experienced designer or art director will tell you, it is never an easy task to create what is quite surely going to be the most visible piece of marketing for an organization. And then, after you and your team have created your designs, you have to present them to your client and make your case.

The key to a good design meeting is to make sure you are the expert in the room. Be prepared to present your work with confidence, discuss why you made the decisions you made, and answer all client questions with a confident explanation of the reasoning behind your design decisions. Be aware of the design goals and the project scope before going to the meeting. Know your project. Also, don’t be afraid to spend a few moments doing something like discussing color theory to prove a point. Don’t bore the room to sleep, but by making your point through the basic fundamentals of design application you may convince everyone in the room that the reason you refuse to put red links on a black background is because no matter what anyone thinks, it will not work! They won’t (shouldn’t) question your reasoning because you’ve based your decisions on sound design principals.

Of course, if you make sure your designs are good (what? what is good? who said it was good?) in the first place then you won’t have much explaining to do at all!

Written by Matt Glaze