By Bhaskar Chatterjee
In the Aamir Khan starrer Dhoom: 3, the twin brothers have complementary skills; alone they are vulnerable, together they are invincible. The relationship between design and technology is very similar. Together, a winning combination that will drive up your profits and keep you miles ahead of competition.
Take the example of a business website.
Design can make it aesthetically beautiful and functionally intelligent. But responsive design technology (HTML5/CSS3) will make it work seamlessly across devices. In a world where more than 40% prospects reach your website via a mobile device, a non-responsive site to a mobile viewer is like watching a black and white movie on plasma TV. Design can give websites a striking front-end, but what’s the point in having a static website whose content never changes. Technology (Content Management System) can give it an easy to use back-end making it easy for you to constantly add fresh content. Everyone (your prospects/ customers and even search engine crawlers) wants to know what’s new and happening in your organization. This needs to reflect on your website on a continuing basis. Besides, a site whose content is getting refreshed periodically is a crawlers dream. Search Engine crawlers feed on new, interesting and fresh content and reward your site for providing them with nourishment by taking your site up the SEO rankings.
CCD (Conversion Centered Design) is the new buzzword in design. While UCD (User Centered Design) focuses on how simple and easy the design is for a user to traverse through, CCD has a single minded objective: Conversion. They (UCD and CCD) do cross paths, but the fundamental difference is that CCD focuses on conversion. CCD involves building high converting landing pages for your PPC, email and social media campaigns. But landing pages are meaningless if the right prospects don’t reach them. SEO, social media, email marketing tools (all technology’s children) together create the the ideal ecosystem for prospects to notice, get interested in your offers and land on your landing pages.
And then there is Analytics and A/B testing, gifts from technology that keep telling you whether your designs are working in real life with real people and which one works better. Gone are the days when one only needed to design a beautiful corporate website and live happily ever after.
Today, it’s paramount for marketers to optimally use the combined strength of design + technology on a continuing basis to win big in the ever-evolving marketplace. Any less of one will make your inbound marketing strategy weak and not deliver results. So give both design + technology equal importance, mix them up like a perfect cocktail and sit back and watch the Dhoom in sales happen.
Bhaskar Chatterjee
Co-Founder and CEO
Zero-G Design
Zero-G Design is a branding, design and digital marketing consultancy.
We use the combined power of business innovation + design + technology
to help businesses get noticed and achieve rapid growth.