Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

There is a continuing need in management to understand the needs of a customer versus the way a programmer looks at his craft. 

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Andrew Neitlich mentions on sitepoint that he believes that to be successful at anything it helps to have these three things: 

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1. Talent. 

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2. A demand for your talent by others. 

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3. Passion for expressing your talent. 

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From this base he says that successful web designers need at least one of the following talents:

- Great design sense, such that clients measurably improve the image they convey to others. 

- The ability to show clients how to make money (not an empty promise, or a focus on SEO only, but true knowledge of how to convert visitors to dollars). 

- The ability to write elegant code that does a job well and solves real problems. 

While there are many varying needs among consumers for web design that it is impossible to even begin to cover even a few, it has been my experience and have heard feedback from all over that one of the greatest problems customers have with designers isn’t so much the talent level, but rather the tendency to always want to do more on a site than is needed for the sites end-user: their customer. 

I have talked about that here some, mentioning that a lot of times there is a huge gap between practical functionality and the designer wanting to create something that is ‘cool.’

I do appreciate what is said in reference to the middle thought about “how to convert visitors to dollars.” The problem as I said is that many times what is thought of as great design or functionality by the designer can actually cause the customer to leave rather than do the task that the site is created for. 

It is my thought that the customer has always got to be forefront of the purpose for anything that will be on the site. Period! Anything else can be more confusing and time-consuming than the customer wants to put up with. We as managers need to make sure that our designers aren’t being more creative than the purpose calls for. The result will be lost customers rather than satisfied ones.