Future Tense: Websight

Posted 06/01/2011 at 2:10pm | by David Gerrold

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Marshall McLuhan once said that the medium is the massage.  

If that’s true, then the Internet is a serious pummeling by an unruly mob, with an occasional mugging mixed in.    

The architects of this beating are web-designers.  The best evidence of this can be found at Vincent Flanders’ website, http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/.  The theory behind Web Pages That Suck is that you can learn a lot about good design by looking at bad design.  Flanders also has two similarly-titled books on the subject and his website and his books ought to be mandatory reading for anyone designing, building, or even maintaining a website.  

 A website is like a yacht.  It’s a hole in the water into which you pour time and money, except there’s no water and no yacht, and no bikini-clad blonde on the foredeck.  

If you’re building one of those non-existent yachts, then you know that designing it, assembling it, testing it, tweaking it, plugging in the content, can be a painful collision of art and function.  

Your website is your public face to the world.  Whether you’re an individual or a business, an organization or a company, or merely a special-interest group, it demonstrates who you are.  It’s an expression of your self.    

You will certainly want it to be attractive.  Depending on your goals for the site, you may also want it to be dramatic, enthusiastic, playful, sincere, inviting, and authentic.  Or … you may want it to be horrific, bizarre, sinister, and disturbing.  Whoever you want to be, however you want the world to think of you, your website is your place to create it.  

But whatever the design and appearance of a website, the primary purpose is still the delivery of content.  The users come to your site looking for specific content.  If they find it, they stay.  If they don’t find it, they go somewhere else.     

Whatever the site, whether it’s Amazon, Netflix, Google News, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, IMDB, HuffingtonPost, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Lifehacker, Gizmo, Cracked, The Onion, or even your favorite porn portal, the most important thing about a website is its content.  

So that’s:

Rule 1.  Content.  

And … the content has to be easily accessible.  

That means that the menus have to be clearly visible and logically organized.  Menus can be tabbed across the top or stacked down the side in a vertical column, or even some combination of the two:  a horizontal main menu for major categories, a vertical menu specific to each page.  

But if a page has too many menu items, it quickly becomes confusing.   The user doesn’t want a vast table of contents on the top level and he doesn’t want a half-vast labyrinth of submenus either.  He wants clearly defined tabs that let him drill down to the specific content he’s looking for.  Three clicks or less.  If it takes more than that to find the target page, it becomes frustrating and annoying.  Especially if there’s no cheese at the end of the tunnel.

So that’s:

Rule 2.  Convenience.

The first graphical browser for surfing the web was Mosaic, released in 1993.  That was the transformative moment when website design became important.  It was also the moment when Pandora opened the damn box and let loose thousands of amateurs who set out to prove that they were marvelous web designers because they knew how to use all the tools dramatically.  

By the time the dot-com bubble burst, the web had been inundated with splash pages, bloated flash animations, buttons and doodads that danced and twirled, menus that bounced, popped, sparkled, dropped, exploded, and took forever to download.  All that experimentation was fun—but it got in the way of the content, it wasn’t convenient, it wasn’t easy.  

Fortunately, popular website design has evolved past that.  We have a comfortable standard that most sites seem to follow.  First, there’s an identifying banner across the top—that’s where designers usually have the most fun with artwork.  

Below that, most content-heavy sites have a horizontal tabbed menu and easy submenus.  Lighter sites, not needing as many options, can present their menu either horizontally or vertically.

Primary content is usually presented in a wide column in the center of the page.  Ancillary content, like vertical menus, additional resources, or ads, will then be presented in a narrower column, right or left.  

Content-heavy sites are more likely to go to three columns:  a wide column in the center, flanked by two sidebars.  Generally, a content-heavy site will break its content up into multiple pages rather than have you scroll down too far.  

While the above isn’t the only way to design a website, it has become the commonest design and users seem to be comfortable with it, probably because of its overall resemblance to a magazine page—albeit an interactive one, with music, animation, video, and pop-ups.  

As a de facto standard, it’s easy and efficient, and it provides quick access to content.  It’s a good example of form-follows-function. 

And that’s:

Rule 3.  Competency.

It doesn’t hurt to have some sense of design and color.  But even if not, use a little common sense.  

There should be high contrast between text and background.  Light on dark is dramatic, but dark on light is easier to read.  I prefer a light colored background because pure white is like staring into a light bulb.  And the smart designer knows to avoid heavily-patterned backgrounds behind the text, because that’s distracting.  Color creates emotional impact, but too much color or inappropriate colors can drive users away.  Don’t put yellow text on a red background, don’t put red text on a pink background.  (I’ve seen both of these horrors—and from people who should know better.)

The casual blogger can put together something at WordPress and be up and running almost immediately.  WordPress and Blogger are the two most popular tools because they’re easy and convenient and there are a lot of attractive themes you can instantly plug in and tweak to your needs.

For those who like hand-tool their own sites, there are many more sophisticated tools.  It doesn’t hurt to look around the web to see what other web designers have done, paying attention to what works and what doesn’t work.  Learning from others’ mistakes can be even more valuable than learning from their successes.  

Content, Convenience, and Competence.  That’s the goal.  

What do you think?  

What advice would you give to a website designer?