Design is a skill I am gradually learning, it’s a slow process and it doesn’t help much that I am immune to choosing nice colours usually, however I think that as I continue to read I am nudging myself in the right direction, finally.
In case you have been asleep recently and have missed Web 2.0 completely, the great buzzword that it is, then you will have noticed the now common idea of distributed, user-driven content. Content that is finally becoming personal, (Timothy’s idea is finally showing), and that is delivered on a users request and not when an administrator bothers to. This gives us great flexibility to do us what we want with the data, present it in any way we wish. Great you think, well yes and no. These sites work well because one of aspect in their design..
Simplicity, it’s visually appealing, they fit the purpose and much like Windows, it just works. They don’t annoy anyone by setting annoying quotas and silly little animations when you do something right, I applaud them because of this.
Anyway, with this revision of my site I tried to find a template to mould that followed some simple design principles, many will work anywhere, but it’s outside these principles that you can play with.
I read a riveting article today about text spacing and about how it affects a users experience on a website. Personally when you look at a page, what annoys you? Well, flash usually is a big one, large imagery and overly fancy sites also get up my nose, also this is why I cannot even contemplate using MySpace. So what you follow?
Well, 90% of the data on the web is in fact… Text. Strange that one, please bare this in mind. Make sure it is readable and most of all the focus of the web site, (unless you are running a picture/video site, which you can now ignore my comments), treat users with respect and make sure they are the focus of the site.
Enough rambling.
