I’m online, therefore I am: the experience of the web designer Gerd
Published by Incomedia in Success stories · Thursday 05 May 2022
If you aren’t online, you don’t exist. A mantra -which does sound a bit threatening- we all are more or less consciously aware of, including the owners of the about 1.83 billion currently online websites, as well as the administrators of the e-commerce platforms, a field that has never before lived such a great moment of flourishing growth and that should reach 4.9 billion dollars of sales by the end of 2021. Also Gerd Gratenau, a graphic designer who’s active on the web, is more than convinced about this. With WebSite X5, in fact, he shares his experience with who wants to take advantage of web potential. I’m online, therefore I am.
Hi Gerd! So, what do you think: is being online that crucial nowadays?
[image:image-0]Of course it is! In my opinion, you need a website as a sort of legitimation of your own existence, regardless of the field you’re in. How to go online, whether by using a simple showcase website or something more complex and structured, is another story which depends on a personal choice. The important thing is to be there, to be online and to use the space we have to talk about a topic, a product, a service.
If you had to give out tips on good website creation, what would they be?
I believe that a website is a showcase that can be used to talk about ourselves to a wide audience. The best way of doing this is using images. We used to say a picture is worth a thousand words, now we talk about communicating via images. Two ways of conveying the same message. And with a website, we have endless possibilities to take advantage of the strength of the images: better not miss it! And, it’s important, like for any creative project, to carefully plan the website we’re building by asking ourselves some crucial questions: “What do I want to show? Who is it for? And how?”. This is how we can achieve good results.
Can you tell us about some of the websites you’ve created as a web designer?
I worked on many projects throughout the years, my favourite is www.amberundberg.de, the website I created for Liv Amber and Alexander Berg, authors of crime novels based in Berlin. A novel is a world on its own made of printed words, and the website is a way of providing more context and creating a base for this parallel universe. Surely a more effective way than the simple text printed on the cover of a book.
With the author-duo, I immediately arranged the website style, which should have somehow reflected the color and atmosphere of the novels. That’s how the newspaper layout was born.
And you used WebSite X5 to bring this virtual world to life, didn’t you?
Precisely! I ran into WebSite X5 during online searches and what hit me at first was that it wasn’t an online editor based on subscription, but a desktop software which could be used offline as well, something I find very useful. I never left it since, and I still use it to create my clients' websites.
I also like the way the website creation process and the contents are managed, because you can really focus on the structure of the page and therefore get a more effective result. It’s also possible to check out the work you are doing using the internal preview function: so I can see how the website looks on the different resolutions, and that’s a huge help.
Can you tell us 3 reasons why people should be using WebSite X5?
Well, I would say its user-friendliness: you don’t need to code and still get great results both as far as the graphics and the ranking are concerned. There are in fact many options related to SEO, and you don’t have to be an expert to use them.
There are many useful guides and tutorials explaining step by step how to get this or that particular effect, and that’s for sure a great pro!
And then I like the fact that you can work offline and have all of your files stored locally on PC, like I mentioned before.
The Amber & Berg website isn’t the only one you made with WebSite X5...
Actually it isn’t. Another example I could mention is the one I created for the writer Sybille Schrödter, www.sybilleschroedter.de: here, I managed the menu by creating clickable graphic elements for each entry. You just need a bit of creativity and, thanks to the included functions, you really have a lot of possibilities.
The ones I mentioned are just some of the websites I created with WebSite X5, and I am sure that I’ll keep using it for my future projects as well.