Website UX

I’m currently building a website for a new business I’m starting, and I keep being surprised at the user-interface challenges posed by designing a way for people to give you money.

Hitherto, most of my web development experience has been about presenting information, which just means doing a specialized kind of graphic design. Self-critical as I might be about my graphic design skills, this limits the number and kind of choices I have to make.

In this case I’m using the much-vaunted (and so far not over-sold) Squarespace for the design and hosting. I went with one of their lovely templates for the site because I didn’t want to spend forever on the coding part of the process.

This works as advertised. What Squarespace can’t do for me is make decisions. Which page should contain this or that idea? How do I want to describe the services I offer? Will people just click a button to go the payment page directly, or should I first take them to another informational page so they know exactly what they’re getting into?

It all needs to fit together in a way that makes people feel confident about what they’re buying, and that’s challenging. I know how my brain works, but it may not be the way the masses’ brains work.

I guess this is just another way that everything takes longer and gets more complicated than you imagined when you started.