What happens if you take web design too far?

Posted by Sebastyn Sebby on Aug 3, 2008 in Web desing | 2 comments

We have all heard, that you should check your code that it is properly generated. Your site should look the same on every browser and every computer. It should also look the same if a colour blind person looks at it. It shouldn’t contain images so that it’s easy to download with slow connection, and you shouldn’t use browser specific markup language.

Quite frankly, I personally think all of the above is more or less crap.

The thing is, that today most “civilised” countries have a reasonable Internet connection base, and the people who have a slow connection probably know that they have to wait a bit more than 3 seconds for a website to load up. I know I can wait patiently for a website to load if I think there’s anything worth seeing – and if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t have clicked the link anyway. However, if I find after the loading, that I was lured to an ugly website, I’m out of there. In fact, if I’m lured to an ugly (plain & simple) website that loaded in 0,001 seconds, I’m out of there.

Some web designers even think about the psychological effect of colours on a website. Red is apparently a bad colour to use, because it makes people be WARNED that your site is DANGEROUS. That’s the biggest load of bull I’ve ever heard. In fact, one the websites I have used the most was mainly bright red and white in design. (I don’t go there anymore that often, but for other reasons than the colour of it, I think 3 years of daily usage would prove that the colour had nothing to do with it.) In fact I tend to be drawn to deep red sites. Not surprisingly I selected such theme for this blog as the first option – which I gave up because I needed more columns. It’s still in use with my gallery. But I still think my preference for pink or red is my personal preference and should not be used as a guide for your design necessarily.

Colour blindness is a good thing to take into consideration, but it is too much to design a website that will look the same to all normal people as well as those with a range of different colour blindness. Not to mention the all together blind, who browse with a device that reads out texts, links and image alt-texts for them. While it is a good idea to put the alt-labels on the images, it is too much to ask to make the colours look the same to a colour blind person. The main thing is, that they will be able to see what you wrote – unless you really want to service them especially. The way I see colours, there’s no point making every visitor of yours suffer from colour blindness that they don’t have.

I say designers who think their website success is dependent on these things are thinking waaaay too hard. Content is the king, but if the king lives in an environment like a hut in a jungle, then a modern person probably won’t take his teachings too seriously, no matter how wise the man was but leave asap out of fear of ending up being the main course at the cannibals weekly festival.

Instead, what I urge for you to do when considering the design, is to check where is the world going. You don’t want to fall too far behind of the latest trends, because that will make you look like… Well, someone who has fallen behind of the latest trends. People will want to find some level of familiarity on your website, where the navigation is found, the widgets used on the side bar, just to get their head around the place. At the same time, you have to make the design yours. Even if you use one of the templates on Blogger.com, you should find a way to at least post your avatar on the site to state that this is YOUR blog. I don’t really care for sites using default templates or one of the picks from the template gallery, but I sure encourage that rather than writing your own code without knowing full well what you are doing.

A good way of getting a great layout without having to pay a load of it, is to browse through free blog templates or website templates (depending on what you’re doing) and go with them. It really doesn’t matter if there’s someone using the same template as you are, after all, you’re probably wearing the same shirt & jeans as someone else is right now, and nobody even notices. That is, as long as you don’t want your templates and clothes match your company colours, which is a whole other matter. For a casual blogger the free templates will do nicely.

It is more important that you like your blog design than to attempt to please everyone out there. You will NEVER EVER be able to design a web site or a blog that everyone will like, not in a million years so you just get that right out of your head. Instead, design something that you will like and something that you think reflects you as a person or a company or what ever you’re trying to promote. You will be on that site more than anyone else, and you will be the one writing the King Content on it. You have to like what you see in the end, to enjoy your project, or it will not amuse you for long enough to make it a success no matter what your design looks like.

There. I said it. My unorthodox view on web design. I finally came out of the closet. :p