Out of Egypt:

wake up, web designers: your hipness is boring

Words of wisdom from Web Pages that Suck:
"People seeking entertainment generally have a wide assortment of computer games to choose from. The odds are that they're on a commercial website (yours included) to seek information instead. When entertaining them with "creative" forms of navigation interferes with their quick and easy access to that information, the web site fails."

The prevailing metaphor for web interaction is something like this: top banner w/ logo & search (login, if necessary) >> top nav links for sections of site >> left nav for navigation within a section >> content (most links here being to external sites) >> footer (with links to contact info & legalese). It's not exciting, but it's not supposed to be. If it stays in the background, it's working properly, aiding rather than inhibiting people's flow through your site.

Sure, it's not the only way that navigation can work. But it is a good way, and so has become the standard (just like links on the right seem to be fairly standard on blogs).

The task facing the graphic designer for 'serious' websites is thus not "what amazing new thing can I come up with this time?" but "how can I ring the changes on a familiar theme?" (through tasteful brand-sensitive use of logos, images, fonts, color scheme, etc.) It's not as fun perhaps as reinventing the wheel might be. But it's more likely to result in a good product.

Save your innovation for your personal page, gallery, blog, video game promotion, Burger King campaign website, etc. And let the rest of us navigate the Web in peace.

Oh, and if you want to see the kind of results that creativity can generate within constraints, check out Brown U's template project (a stark contrast to their ridiculous experiments with their undergrad & grad school homepages). Or, even better, check out the CSS Zen Garden. For all you Drupaliers, there's a similar site just for Drupal themes.

(I'm excited about the possibility of having my own domain up and running. Possibly in December, if, Lord willing, I've taken the GRE by then.)

Since trackbacks are borked I will use this space to announce that I have some related thoughts on this at my blog. Feel free to take a look, I hope it's at least sort of interesting.

Posted by: nougatmachine at October 27, 2007 2:06 PM