additions…

…editorial…

a look at my own…

I would not be surprised if a lot of visitors think my work should be improved and made more artistic, and that most of those who think they can improve my creations like to call themselves “web designers”.

I would however be surprised if not more than 90% of those “web designers” would turn my works of art into useless web-garbage if they got a chance – and claim they have improved it. So, to avoid having to clean up other designers' acts, I prefer to take care of my own art myself.

my anonymous content carriers:

Web design, to me, is about creating a well-suited carrier for content, and anything that takes attention away from content without adding to usability, is discarded by me at an early stage of development.

Yes, the apparent lack of colors and trendy design-details is intentional, and is not the result of lacking skills and talent on my part. I deliberately designed a set of visually anonymous content-carriers – pages with many visual details that are for the most part meant to be overlooked, and I keep on refining their anonymity.

I'm especially pleased with pages like this one, where there's hardly a design-distraction in sight. It is of course a disappointment for those who surf the web looking for amazing designs, as its main target is content-searchers.

If you're looking for information and/or personal views – organized in an orderly manner, then I got some. You'll have to have a keen eye for details if you came for more, but, I assure you; it's all here.

looking at others…

I have an open mind about what others want, and create, for themselves. There's room for many expressions on the web, and I can't see why people shouldn't feel free to express themselves – even if I often disagree on how they do it.

I readily accept that other designers put focus on other things than I do, and fill the web with creations that suit their own taste. I would actually be surprised if all that many designers shared my taste, since that would mean I was trendy in some way without being aware of it.

the good:

There are many good web designers around who manage to improve visitors' experience visually while at the same time provide documents with excellent content-delivery vehicles. Most of them go about it in entirely different ways compared to mine, which of course is fine. There are so many ways to include personal flavor and a touch of class in ones creations, that although we're mostly tied to these screens the sky is the limit.

The really good web designers out here pay proper attention to what's behind the visual layer, making sure the support-structure is stable enough to carry both their visual design and the content. Although most visitors may appreciate these designers' visual work and leave it at that, for me it is the structural work that makes these designers stand out. Whether they did it all themselves or had some exceptionally good front-end coders to do it for them, is unimportant as long as it works.

the bad:

A little round-trip on the web shows that the average web designer has so little knowledge and/or understanding of underlying structure and how normal web browsers work, that the term “building castles in the air” is most fitting. Doesn't look like the average designer cares much either, so there's plenty of space for those who do.

Some in this category do care – once they've been made aware of weaknesses and flaws, and may slowly but steadily advance towards the good web design category. In time they may learn to master the craft in quite some depth, and express themselves through more robust illusions.

the ugly:

That so many designs are weak and fail somewhat under stress, is one thing. A lot worse that many designs don't even provide reasonable good access to the content unless specific conditions are met – equal to the designer's own set-up. Lack of knowledge, testing and care is probably the reason for many such complete failures, but some designers actually believe they can enforce specific conditions on visitors … go figure.

It is beyond me how any web designer, amateur or professional, can expect visitors to accept being limited to a designer's personal preferences, and yet; more such dysfunctional nonsense is spewed onto the web every day. Will creators of such garbage ever bother to learn anything useful about the craft known as web design?

Since designers and visitors rarely ever meet to discuss what works and what doesn't, and so few designers would really listen even if such discussions took place, even the worst designs can be given a pass and no complaints being heard. Guess that's how it works in the cool but clueless circles – it doesn't work but nobody cares.

Of course, if the design gets in the way of content I may just leave a site – any site. However, people leave sites just as often because there's no content for them to stay for, so finding reasons to stay on a site is very much up to the individual visitor's interest and/or taste anyway.

I guess the wide range of interests and tastes is what makes it possible for all the good, the bad and the ugly to coexist on the web. Hope there won't ever be too much uniformity out here, but I sure would like to see a slightly higher quality-level and fewer ugly and dysfunctional web designs.

a web-surfer's shopping-list…

When one has surfed the web for more than a decade and seen the good, the bad and the ugly sides of web design, one may end up with a shopping-list of sort. Of course, a few things have changed over the years, but what worked well a decade ago tend to work now and what didn't work back then don't stand much of a chance now either.

I'm basically looking for two things on a website: useful information and working site-navigation. The visual designs may be fancy, amazing, exceptional or just plain boring, as their qualities lies almost entirely in how well they carry content through to visitors.

As my list shows: there is plenty of playroom for good web designers today, and plenty of traps and sinkholes for the unqualified and/or less dedicated ones to fall into. With time the playroom will expand and the number of traps will grow, but beyond that I don't think the next decade will bring any major changes in web design.

keyword: communication…

To me web design is all about communication, and good communicators can get their messages through even if the visual design isn't particularly good. Really good content does of course live best on top of high-quality low-key designs, but it can survive well in worse environments too.

A bit worse if bad communicators rely entirely on visual designs to carry their weaker messages through, as they may end up with high-ranking “double-click sites” – one enters a page and clicks the Back button seconds later. Such double-click sites may generate statistical numbers and irritation, but not much else.

No wonder one has to spend so much time on searching if one is looking for serious content and valuable information, since one has to wade through all the content-weak double-click sites first. Google, Yahoo and most other search engines are not very helpful these days, and no signs they'll improve much any time soon.

The ever-growing information overload problem won't be dealt with in the near future, although there are several attempts on writing intelligent software intended to assist us in our search for something of value. Guess the result will depend on which values one has, as visitors will probably be categorized in consumer-groups – as usual.

selectivity…

Like most people I have personal preferences, which guide communication in a media-dependent way. I discriminate heavily in this “age of communication”, and don't buy into any trends. I'll keep on searching for information that matters to me, and keep my eyes open for improved methods that can help me sort out and avoid stuff I'm not interested in.

I'm not much for small-talk if there's a physichal divide between me and those I'm “talking” to, so the web has its obvious limitations. I prefer to be close enough to physichally shake hands with people I chat with, and various virtual replacements for that handshake don't really work all that well for me.

The web works rather well for pragmatic and fact-seeking people like me, once we have gotten used to the time-consuming drill-down process necessary to bypass the superficial layers. First we have the enormous amounts of shallow content to get past, and then there are all the distracting design-details one simply has to ignore.

A mix of conscious and unconscious selectivity takes over after a while, making it easier to quickly distinguish between stuff that might be of interest, and all the rest. No need to bother about the vast woods when one is looking for specific trees, is there?

visitors' privilege…

On the web the visitors – end-users – are in charge, and visual designers have zero control. Since I'm in charge of structural as well as visual design, my control is slightly better but still somewhat limited.

Some visitors actually think my designs deliver content better when made even more anonymous , so it's a good thing I have designed for that kind of treatment. Now my designs won't have to compete with the honorable visitor' local set-up, and there's just enough left to preserve visual structure and my distinctive style.

As a web designer I have no problems with loss of visual design at the user-end, as I'm only suggesting what my creations should look like in otherwise capable browsers – “suggesting” is all CSS can do anyway. If a visitor wants to strip off a layer, then that's fine with me.

I prefer to surf with Lynx myself, and that browser ignores all CSS, imagery, javascript and other features visual design is based on – leaving only the underlying structure of any design intact. Good thing my document-structure is designed so it can carry content in an organized manner on its own.

a web carpenter's conclusion…

It sure isn't trendy to lose control over ones web designs, but since one obviously only has limited control anyway one may as well forget about trends and learn how to use what little control one has. “Visual control” is only an illusion in web design, but structural and semantic control is very real.

One can design freely on all layers, and it may work reasonably well when integrated and aimed towards a common goal: content-delivery. At the moment of writing I'm trying to figure out what I can do with Scalable Vector Graphics – svg, and which design-layers that technology may work best on – also when it isn't supported.

So, no need to leave out anything while designing web pages, as most of it will reach most visitors as one intended. Just be aware of the fact that it might not, and that no design, no matter how advanced, can make up for the lack of good, well organized and accessible content on the web.

sincerely 

Hageland 04.nov.2008
last rev: 28.nov.2008