Recently, having to work with different people who aren’t connected with design, and web-design in particular, gave me the opportunity to see how most of the people see and perceive this field. It isn’t as you’d expect.

Clients who exist for a while now and run a fast growing business decide they need an online presence or they need a facelift, because the brand manager suggested so. And this is the best case scenario. When there’s a brand manager involved, usually it’s easier for the designer and the chances for a better final product grow exponentially.

But what do you do when your client hasn’t the slightest idea of what a website is ? More so, the digital environment is a land he’ll never reach. And if that isn’t enough, there is no brand manager, there is no account manager, no brand guidelines, just a friend who told him a website is a must ?

In this case, I have found a very simple analogy that pays off : websites are very much like people. If you explain this to your clients properly it shortens the time you usually spend consulting your client, it makes the communication easier and it increases the chances both you and your client end up with a product you’re both happy of.

If you start of with the premise that a website isn’t just shiny graphics displayed on a monitor, but a system through which your company exists, you can safely say that a website is a living entity over which you have complete control.

Let’s think of some basic human characteristics :

A living entity has to be born. It is given a name : either it takes the company name much like the son takes his father’s name, either a website is a standalone online presence and it has it’s very own name.

There are two main things a human necessarily needs : food and water in order to survive and clothes in order to be a part of a society. These are minimum investments for a day to day existence, which usually the parents make. A site needs a host in order to survive and a design to be a part of a society. Ignore the costs and the quality of the design for now. Just think of the fact that the quality of the food and of the clothes is directly proportional to your site’s content expansion rate.

Like anybody else, once you develop, you choose a group of friends or acquaintances you find yourself next to almost constantly. You shape your personality according to this group of people : your language, your tone of voice, the way you dress, the way you adapt and how fast you’re growing. A website behaves almost the exact way : you choose it’s target and you start shaping it according to that specific target : language, tone of voice, design, flexible structures, medium and user adaptability. All of this determines the future exposure of your site. As this grows, so do your needs and thus, the need for a unitary visual style and a powerful identity.

Social factors are also a part of this small analogy : everybody has friends and enemies; a site has backlinks and backdoors. Backlinks always help your expansion, while backdoors exploit your vulnerabilities. Your future social status depends on this, so give it the importance it deserves. Usability here has a huge role : the more user-friendly the site, the more backlinks it will get.

Also, let’s not forget that the rules and authorities that govern our society are already transposed into the online medium as copyright laws.

After having kept my pleading, I had the pleasant surprise to find out that the client understood the process we will further undergo in our project far more than I would have used all the educated and vague computer, brand and web terms I could think of.

This is a small and naive list of arguments to prove a very efficient analogy. But the point of this article is not to give you a five step program towards convincing even the hard-headed clients of them all, but to prove that a simple analogy, that a client can relate to, is always efficient.

Use this piece of information, and take the customer through the steps he needs to make an educated choice in working with a designer. That will only benefit us all.