Website Design rant
by cybernoid on Jul 08 2009
What is it with those design purists nowadays? I was reading Jakob Nielsen’s site the other day, and i had concluded (years ago) that the guy is… well, overhyped, considering the bunch of outdated, irrelevant information he’s been spreading around. It still strikes me hard in the nuts that he’s considered a web usability expert. And no, sorry i’m not jealous.
I mean, sure Jakob, your site is usable — not totally usable, if you take a moment and ponder the wall-of-links and the boring colour scheme. Which brings me to the fact that it’s uglier than hell on a bad morning! My eyes feel sore every time i visit your site.
And what is it with this latest article about showing passwords in plaintext and not ****sterisks any more? Firstly, when in a public computer you don’t know when someone’s eye is fixed on your screen. That’s the first rule for stealing a password-upon-entry. Duh! But the problem isn’t the asterisk – the user needs to think of a password they can type relatively quickly and unerringly on their keyboard. But if they clearly see it on the screen, then a potential password thief can look at your keyboard OR your screen. And if you’re not an idiot, the twentieth time you type in your password, you’ll type it in faster and with less errors than the first time. Misspelled password entering “costing you business” is a joke. Except if in your line of work, you need to log in to the same thing every ten minutes.
Anyway, back to the point. My argument is this; you gotta have a beautiful site, as well as a practical one – which should be navigable and well-presented). If the unlikely situation that the Web was controlled by Mr. Nielsen, we’d have a few billion pages with white backgrounds, black text, blue links (and of course purple visited links, no other colours exist) — and no graphical elements except the ones that have a *shudder* ultimate purpose. Given this extremely limited set of features, if you can squeeze a nibble off of your time to think how to lay stuff down — it’s hard to go completely wrong. Unless you have an unusually large amount of information you need to structure, where it can get complex.
But i digress.
People recognise patterns. If you’re presented with a magenta background page with dark green text and light green underlined links – believe me, most of the visitors will recognise where the links are. Provided you keep a consistent pattern in designing all your links on the page to be light green. You can also play around and have a different underline colour, to make the text itself more readable and the underlining more subtle (via the border-bottom CSS property).
Thankfully, the rest of the world supports Flash, Java, 24-bit transparent PNGs (Internet Explorer was a slowpoke in this technological advancement, but oh well). Guess what, there’s a reason. Put some FUN into designing your damn page. We don’t have 14.4kbps modems any more, we have brilliant tools to create, and an easier than ever way to publish your creations to the rest of the world. You can also put some embellishment, a little spice-me-up-don’t-let-me-die-of-boredom element… because you can. Because you want to stand out from the crowd. If you don’t, still that’s really fine. But it’s your option. It’s not *bad design*.
Of course, you’d better take it easy with going overboard, since it’s typical to see an overuse of Flash applets or huge images on a website. But so, fucking, what! The human race has a cultural (thus aesthetic) diversity, so must their web sites. You can’t take individuality away from everyone and make them succumb to any laws, because you’ve …”done research” on howeverymany web users. I’m aware that you must use a different design on an informative site, a personal webpage or a social network as you have different limitations. But my point is, if visitors are interested in what you have to say – they’ll bear with your yellow text on dark red background. I know i have, on countless other pages – that aren’t devoid of any personal touch whatsoever.
Don’t stay in science lab too much – go for a walk, then back to design something.
December 12th, 2009 on 20:23
Wow
thanks for the post . .. very nice blog man .. and usefull information on it.