Ethical Website Design: Why It Is Important? Complete Guide

With the emerging need for digital marketing services in all spheres of businesses worldwide, there has been a consequent rise in the demand for Website design services and Web development services.

Without a website, an online business will be soulless & won’t have any characteristics or individuality of its own. A website is a platform where a company expresses what it’s all about, what services it provides, and how it operates. As of January 2021, There were 1,197,982,359 websites in the whole world! 

Website designing is a complicated task, no doubt about it, and therefore web designers have highlighted the significance of their Website design services in the digital world of online business.

With new technological advancements, knowledge, and innovation in the web designing industry, there exists a new set of challenges. Inspiration gives birth to a new piece of art; the same goes for website designing. Getting inspired by someone else’s style of website designing is not wrong, but you must be sure that you aren’t stealing someone else’s web design.

Even if your client is asking to deliver a complete copy of some other website or have a deadline, you must ensure that you are honest with your work. When you emphasize creating a web design based on your original idea, it boosts your credibility as a reliable and trusted web designer.

Website developers and designers have to extensively talk about the ethics of web designing, which shall include responsibilities of a designer, originality, and other ethics of web design. Not just that, every design on a webpage affects the user in some way.

Therefore, digital creators must feel that they have a much greater responsibility for them because their actions will impact the end-users. There are some questions that you must ask yourself as a designer in the present state of digital enhancements.

1. What type of interface do you want to build for your website visitors? What will be their authority?
2. Are your actions as a web designer morally correct?

Almost 15-20 years ago, the once invented ideas in small offices, garages, and college hostels changed the way we experienced our digital world. We made various platforms that helped people enhance their lives in several ways, but we also made those platforms prone to issues like the spread of fake news and brutal cyberbullying.

What does this say? It clearly shows how the small choices that we made in the past affected our future. It shows how the actions we take in the past have an amplified effect in the future. So it’s time to think about what we want in the future. It’s time to specify rules, especially when it comes to the ethics of web design.

Ethics In Web Design

When a designer or a developer decides a web design, he or she is making that decision on behalf of the audience. Therefore, as a digital creator, you must think of web designing as a great responsibility.

You must think beyond the project deadlines assigned by your company or the client & must think beyond the technicalities. Start focusing on how your choices will affect the end-users who exist in the real world as well.

Don’t consider these thoughts about making the web an ideal place or making sure whether anybody is at risk or not a part of ‘ideal principles’; think about them as a crucial part of your everyday work process. No, moral obligations won’t affect your creativity in any way. They must be kept to fuel your creativity. We have to consider some web design ethics that pave the path for future web designers as well.

The whole modern tech industry has faced the same dilemma about how they can bring out a better version of the world into the digital space. Many of them are now asking questions about how we can measure the success of a web design or a website in terms of other factors other than just “sales or revenues”.

We can use these theories and think about a standard structure for web design ethics that can help our present and the future make better decisions for everyone. We can’t make a solid list of bad or good things for internet users, but we can create a framework that can help us evaluate our decisions.

Principles Of Ethics In The Digital Community

If we talk about web design or computer advancements in general, then I feel that ethics should be the focal point of discussion. It has to be the main ingredient. The whole digital community must practice the fundamentals of ethics.

So are we going to lay down some dos and don’ts? Well, ethical principles can often drift towards making such statements, where they may list down some activities to be harmful and some to be the correct option.

But what do we mean by harmful or non-harmful actions? Who defines that? Nobody can have a strict definition of these two terms because an action that might be harmful to someone might not be harmful to another person. So yes, it’s subjective because different people would judge the same action differently.

Similarly, when we say that we want to lay out a positive framework for ethical website design we face a similar dilemma because we can’t specify what’s good for the people. Why so? Again the simple reason – subjectivity.

The Need Of Ethical Principles

We desperately need an ethical framework that can help us judge every individual decision objectively based on some standard principles. When we have such principles we can carefully consider the impact of each decision and its outcomes.

Instead of listing decisions as bad or good, we should have some principles that can allow us to judge the outcomes that we’ll see in the end, and it should help us judge what should be the best practices, what capabilities it offers to those who get affected.

Web designing is a critical job, and a designer is a person who takes the final call about the appearance, functionality, and impact of the web experience they provide to the end-users.

When we talk about web designers, we don’t mean to emphasize the jobs of a web designer who designs the appearance of the webpage, it’s much more than that. The web design team includes developers, UX/UI designers, content strategists, web architects, and even content writers that affect the end-users’ experience. 

Conclusion 

There is a stark difference between taking inspiration from a website and blatantly plagiarising web designs. Although this distinction between both of them is minimal, one should take care of it. Don’t your web designing drift towards “copying.”

Ensure that your web development team is choosing the correct methods while developing a website so that, in the end, your designs are authentic as well as abide by the moral codes of work. It would be best if you kept a close eye on certain things like whether your logo is unique or copied. Copying a logo not just falls in the parameter of ethical violation but is also illegal. The company can have copyright over their logo.