Why pay a designer when I can do it myself?

It looks easy enough. A brochure or flyer can be whipped up in 5 minutes (okay, 30 minutes) in Word or Photoshop, right? Your niece/neighbor/brother-in-law is a whiz on a computer. Between the two of you, you can whip something up, right? Besides, it looks like fun.

Let's assume you're capable of selecting a couple of colors, fonts and you've found some appropriate photos/art. Great. Now try putting them together.

Not quite what you were after? Try using a wizard or template.

Still have a nagging suspicion that it's, well... a bit ordinary? Something's missing, but you can't put your finger on what it is. The photos are great, the font is cool, the color is your favorite... Why is this so damn hard? In a word: composition.

Composition is the secret ingredient that separates professional design from home-made efforts.

Design is just a fancy word for composition. Designers are simply composers of visual elements. Whether they are fashion designers, interior designers or graphic designers, they are trained to select scale, color, shape, line, texture, materials and a myriad of other choices to create arrangements that look coherent and have that wow factor.

Composition is the art of taking raw ingredients (text, photos, a logo) and organizing them into an interesting, pleasing, coherent arrangement. This involves decisions such as how large each element should be, what colors to use where, what shapes to introduce. It involves creating a sense of hierarchy on the page so that the viewer is not paralyzed by too many choices. Most of all, it requires editing the thousands of possibilities, and then modifying them as needed to produce an original appealing look. The result is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

To the untrained eye, it's often easier to spot a design that lacks composition than one that has it. Just open the Yellow Pages and scan the ads. Ever noticed how easily you're seduced by ads that look simple, elegant and organized, versus ones that just scream 20 messages at you? A presentation without composition is like an orchestra with no conductor.

What else can a designer offer that I can't do myself?

Skill and speed. As with any endeavor, the longer you do it, the faster and better you get at it. Someone who works with visual software every day is going to be faster and more skilled than someone who dabbles or is still mastering it.

Longevity: Being immersed in the design world, they are more likely to know when a trend has reached saturation point, and steer you in the direction of emerging trends for a look that is current and that will last longer.

Raw materials: Designers have access to hundreds of fonts. They also know how to tweak them to give your logo/piece a custom look. (When you use a font that's available with standard software like Word, the results look ordinary. Why? Because your eyes, and everyone else's, are conditioned to recognize them.) They know where and how to acquire original professional photography or illustration that fits your budget so that you don't end up using mediocre clip art or stock that looks –surprise!– bland and ordinary and, well, home-made.

You already know, from your own experience as a client and a consumer, that a first impression can be the last. Why cripple your efforts with anything less than a fabulous presentation?

a free mini site?

If you haven't already heard, there is a place online that allows anyone to build a quick, simple website. For free. (I'll get to the strings attached in a minute, but they're minimal). Very similar to a blog, except that you can add pages, and basic navigation. i.e. it can be a website or a one-long-page blog. You can even add PayPal buttons. It's called weebly.com

I tested it out, and I think it's perfect for micro-businesses or small organizations (sewing groups, book clubs, neighborhood watch, etc). There are plenty of layouts to choose from. Keep in mind you can change the photos. The only drawbacks I could find were:

a) it's for very small, basic sites only. No secondary navigation.
b) No databases (= no ecommerce, other than a single item button)
c) one or 2 column layouts only (which is fine for 95% of sites)
d) limited choice of fonts
e) there's a credit link at the foot of each page to weebly, small or large depending on the template you choose. You can't delete it.

If you can live within that, it's an amazing deal, especially for a freelancer or small organization. Even the hosting is free! But if you want to host it elsewhere, you can design your site at weebly.com and then download the code as a zip file and upload it to another webhost's server.

How can all this be free? No doubt the creators are pitching it to Google, etc in the hopes of getting rich. The consumer, however, has nothing to lose.

But let's say you want a small site with a lot of photos, music or video. Like, a wedding or baby album. You might be better off using Apple's iWeb, which is part of iLife. It's $79, or free with any Mac.

Follow-up to integrating a blog and newsletter

I wrote too soon. It would be lovely to have a service that integrates blog and newsletter publishing and reliable metrics (to measure your efforts). However, it seems to elude us still.

The blogs on iContact appear within a frame that displays all the iContact Community information (view sample). This is designed to publicize iContact, as well as the other members of the iContact Community. The problem is, it tends to clutter the look of a blog. So if you're not interested in co-branding with them, stick to wordpress.com or blogger.com. You can still use their Archive feature to keep a record of all your past newsletters. THAT is definitely useful for when your clients' email programs don't display your message properly (and over which you have no control). That's the link above every email newsletter that reads, "Having difficulty reading this email? Click here to view it in a browser."

Integrating a blog and an email newsletter

Why would you want/need both a blog and an email newsletter list? Because some fans prefer email, some prefer reading a web page. And you gotta give people what they want. At least, in business.

Okay, so how do you kill two birds with one stone? Sign up with an inexpensive email marketing service like iContact (for $10/mth) and publish both at the same time, by simply checking off the right boxes. They will also manage your surveys, and automate the Subscribe/Unsubscribe process. More importantly, they will track how many people read what you're writing, in both your blog and your emails.