Web Templates Blog wants to welcome Adrian Mullan to our weblog. He has consented to do an interview, the latest in our series of interviews. Adrian is the owner and founder of Webdummy. Adrian is a webpage designer and has interests in internet marketing and search engine optimization. The Webdummy website has some great tutorials and excellent demo visuals. In Adrian’s portfolio I especially enjoyed Manor House and the Cheeky Edge.

“I’ve been in the tech sector for about 11 years now, but didn’t get into web development until around 2000. At the time my father was looking to build a website for his appliance importing business. So I hacked together my first site (it was pretty bad), but it got me into the industry. I managed to get a friend to re-do the graphical design component of the website and I’ve been devouring everything web related since.â€?

I asked Adrian about his early work. “In the beginning, all experience is good experience. . . I quickly worked out which areas I wanted to specialize in (web marketing, seo and usability). I think for website owners (especially small business owners) getting a website up and running these days is relatively straight forward. The challenging part however, is how to get the right eyeballs to the site once you’re up and running. And once you’ve got the visitors, how to get them to do what you want (buy something, fill in a form, download your software, etc). If you speak to most people who have a website and ask them what their number one challenge is, most will say ‘getting the right traffic to my website.’â€?

“I’ve gotten this question many times over the years, so last I decided to publish a course called ‘The Internet Demystified’. It’s written to show small business owners how to market their websites effectively available at WebDummy.com.â€?

What are your specialty areas? “Overall internet marketing, Search engine optimization, Sales copy, and Usability. . . You can have the best looking site in the world, but without some of the above elements, it’s going to be an upstream battle.�

I asked Adrian if he had ever worked with website templates. “Yes, I’ve used a few good templates over the years. . . http://www.templatemonster.com/ , http://www.oswd.org/ , http://www.pixellogo.com/ , http://www.designgalaxy.net/ . . . I think the true test of any website template is how easy it is to modify the template to suit your needs. While many templates look great on the surface, they can be a nightmare to modify. Occasionally we see templates where the original PSD file is hard to work with because the layers are not properly named/organized - but it’s getting better. . . It would nice to see more template providers go towards lean and mean templates, instead of the usual flashy stuff. . . The problem is, if you pull the regular person off the street and ask them ‘what do you think of this website’ instinctively they will base their decision on the aesthetics (not content, usability, search engine friendliness, etc). Having said that, I can understand why template providers promote graphics intensive layouts.â€?

When I asked about Flash Technology, Adrian responded, “In a nutshell, great technology but bad implementation. . . I read somewhere that a recent survey of end-users discovered that 85% of people hate flash intros and find them annoying. This is not surprising. . . Flash is great if you’re designing an online game. It’s great to use within the interface of web applications. It’s great for graphical ads. But by and large, it usually doesn’t serve a real purpose on most websites. . . If you think about it logically, flash is designed as ‘attention-getting’ and ‘eye-catching’ - hence the name ‘flash’. The problem with this is that it distracts users from the real reason they’re on a website - which is the content.â€?

Adrian gave his source of inspiration – “Nice, clean and useable designs. . . If you look at some of the largest sites on the net (e.g. Google, Amazon, eBay) most of them look nothing like the typical website template. They’ve been designed to be clean and quick to load.â€?

Adrian provided two examples of websites that he appreciates that he did not design – “Apple.com and Mozilla.com . . . Both sites are clean and easy-to-use with a nice mix of graphics and content.�

What was the toughest project or customer situation you’ve encountered? “I think like most web professionals, it’s dealing with customers who change their mind every 10 minutes. I’m currently dealing with one customer who has changed his ‘vision’ for the website half a dozen times. My advice to customers is, know what you want. Be clear and be specific. If you can approach a design firm with a crystal clear specification of what you want, you’ll save yourself a fortune in time and money.â€?

What does the future hold? “Number one, Video and audio. This has been in the pipeline for sometime, but we’re only just getting to the stage where broadband connections are becoming the standard. Number two, D.I.Y. If you’ve looked at what has happened with the explosion of blogs, I think a lot more people will come online in the next few years with a ‘diy’ mind-set. The tools need to improve, but that will happen over time.â€?

Thankyou Adrian for sharing your experiences and knowledge, especially your thoughts on webpage templates, flash, and the future.

Arthur Browning