Observations

I love being part of an online community of designers.It's a great ways to get feedback and inspiration, as well as provide the same for other designers. I have recently had a few comments by other web designers about my own site, commenting on the use of certain elements,such as the type as images and not using the latest css for my site. Now, I made a conscious decision to design my site to look a certain way, and focusing on new technology would mean that I would be trying to incorporate my design into this framework, rather than finding the technology that suits what I want to say.

Personally I feel it is one of the reasons that our clients come to Blossom. We focus on the way things look, then how they work, not the other way around, whereas most web designers focus on how things work, then how to make this functionality look good.

I prefer the marketing and branding approach being strong, because most visitors don't care whether you have used a particular javascript framework, or a certain style of div tag. They look at the site, and if it's pretty and "speaks" to them they will stay.

Maybe this is the difference between graphic designers who can create websites and purely web designers. Blossom's focus remains squarely at the marketing needs of our clients, and we use functionality to meet these needs, whereas many of the web design firms out there seem to be looking for ways to use the latest piece of web wizardry.

Either way, it's good to have diversity in a field, and clients choose the focus that they want for their website, branding and marketing mix.