Web design is a creative art. We’ve all experienced situations where we’ve been wowed by a site with an exceptionally creativity design or functionality. However, we’ve also had frustrating experiences with sites that try too hard to buck the trends and wound up being very unusable. In web design and development, creativity and innovation need to be able to work in harmony with usability, not restrict it.

As a designer there’s always that desire to step outside the box and create something truly unique. However, there’s a fine line between positive creativity that will enhance a website and negative creativity that will complicate usability and confuse visitors.

Blending Creativity and Predictability

In my opinion a website doesn’t need to be creative (in terms of design and functionality) in order to be successful. One of the most obvious examples is Craigslist. The idea behind the site and what it accomplishes for visitors are far more important than the look of the site, however, a high-quality design can certainly help.

Those websites that do display creativity and innovation also need to find a way to incorporate predictability for users. Your website’s visitors are going to be impatient, so it’s critical to not make them think or work any harder than necessary if you want them to stick around and take any action.

The predictability is not so much an issue with the design itself, rather with the use of the site. But a design can help or hinder the predictability in a number of ways.

Many web designers fall into a trap by pricing their services lower than they should, which can have a serious impact on their business. Here is a quick look at the many different ways that under pricing your services can hurt you.

Lower Income

Obviously, charging lower prices will mean that you’ll make less from each project. Of course, the mindset of many designers is that they can ultimately make more money by charging lower prices and attracting more business. While that can be true in some cases, it will require you to work considerably more hours to earn the same amount that you could make with higher rates.

Attracts Bargain Shoppers

Many potential clients will contact designers based on their prices. From my experience, if a potential client mentions that they’re contacting you because your prices are low, this is a very bad sign. These types of bargain shoppers can be some of the most difficult clients to deal with. Sure, I understand that business owners need to be wise with their expenses, and that includes the amount that they pay for a website. However, these types of clients often don’t understand the huge gap in quality and types of services that are available. They want an award winning website for a thrift store price.

Sites like Digg prove that user generated content works, but aggregating news is one thing, can they inspire you?

Below you’ll find a list of the best user generated sites to visit when you’re looking for a little inspiration.

Flickr

http://www.flickr.com

Allows you to organize and share your photographs with others. A great source of visual inspiration (like my collection of inspiring cityscapes), and also a good place to find some free photographs to use in the your next project, but be sure to check the license first.

After you complete a website do you review the project and try to measure the results? Was the project successful or a failure?

I have built my share of websites, both for myself and for clients, and find that measuring the success for these can be very different.

It is easy to measure the success of my personal websites. Before starting a new project I set some pretty clear goals, and I’m usually one of the two people involved in building the website so it easy to measure my impact on the project and whether it reached its goal. I usually measure my performance using the following metrics:

Traffic levels
I’ll often measure the success of websites on the traffic levels they achieve. Metrics such as monthly page views, and unique visitors, to RSS feed subscribers are often a good measure of success. When I started Design By Grid I wanted to build a resource for other designers, so I set myself a target of 500 RSS feed subscribers in the first 6 months.

Content Management Systems have become common place for website development, custom development saved for the largest and most unique websites.

Before deciding which CMS is best for your next project it is a good idea to see how others have customized the offering to their needs, as a way to evaluate how flexible the software is. Will it stifle your creativity or will it allow you to incorporate your best design and be able to provide a host of other features that would not be possible otherwise.

The popular CMSs all have strong community offerings including forums where you are encouraged to show off your latest creations, a great place to start when evaluating the software. Browse the list below to find some inspiration, some of them have RSS feeds that you can subscribe to, to stay inspired.

Looking at the results of a good website design helps improve and inspires our own designs, getting into the mind of a designer can be invaluable.

There don’t seem to be many design postmortems published these days, but some designer do discuss their designs and the reasoning behind what they did.

Below you’ll find a collection of blog posts from designers discussing their website designs: