Web design Chaos

Alongside SEO obsessions, there is a growing cohort of web designers trying to get people just as obsessed about their home pages.

While not in the same league of exploiters as in the other subsections, this is about self-proclaimed experts telling others how they are to design their websites, but they really only talk about what goes on the home page, which is hardly a website. Anyone serious about a website will want to do more than just have a home page, so the myriad designers are obsessing over what will be a very small part of the time spent maintaining any site.

This is because they are designers, not content creators. Most of the work that an owner of a small to medium site over its lifetime will be adding and updating content, and sometimes restructuring parts of it. They will want to use templates to make it easy to add that content without having to design every page from scratch. Site visitors will be more comfortable with a common look and feel, because they will not have to keep adjusting to what should be stable elements possibly being in different places on every page they visit.

A site will quite quickly get to dozens or even hundreds of pages, so site owners will not want to waste time on unnecessary consideration of what design elements they are to use on their site. What is important is how to get visitors to those pages, and the key to that is the home page. It is for navigation, which is about getting people to where they want to go quickly, and not get them bogged down trying to work out what the design elements are telling them. The home page is the transit hub of a site, and nobody is there to look at artworks!

The other bias in these presentations is the obsession with visuals. Typography is important, but too much designing usually overtakes the important content, which will be the words that carry the narrative, as it is that which will do the heavy lifting of persuading visitors to buy or read what the site has to offer. Very few of such presenters give even the most rudimentary guidance of what to write that will keep visitors glued to the site. Very few visitors are going to find pictures or fancy CSS animations enough to retain their attention for any more than a few seconds.

This whole designer-focussed thinking is probably because web designers are largely technically oriented, and so more likely to be able to get their heads around the technicalities of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, this leads to a severe bias towards more videos focussed on website technicalities, rather than content maintenance. Basically, we need to listen less to such people and more to those who will help us come to grips with how to structure the content of our sites, and how to make it easier to navigate.

YouTube has a distinct advantage over other social media and that is in its visual focus, which attracted hobbyists to show off their pride and joy, and instructors giving practical advice and how-to instructions for do-it-yourselfers. But unlike the practical focus of those videos, there is a plethora of technical designers who would normally be part of multi-skilled teams, but now are solo but presenting only a small part of what their former teams had to focus upon to build real working sites, and that skewed focus is misguiding would be site owners.

Websites are complex, but only because of the mass of information they hold, and the structures they require. The underlying technology is complex, just because they are disparate technologies that have to work behind the scenes. Frameworks have been created that were supposed to manage all that under-the-hood stuff, but in an effort to cater for multiple audiences, ended up exposing those technologies again.

This is the problem with trying to cater for all audiences, as it just makes everything too complex, which then needs the technical people to look after it, sabotaging the purpose of the frameworks in the first place. Focus on having simple straightforward content with basic formatting, and if the site takes off, resist roping in a bunch of techs to over-engineer it for you. Books are still popular, with most only words and the only visuals being the front and back covers. People read them to be transported in their minds, and that is the same skill required for websites.

For some guidance about creating website content, see Writing.