Does my page suck?
Here is an interesting article I just found on how to tell if your web page is "design hell." The article detailed a (rather large) list of things that qualify as poor web design; I enjoyed the article (which is I guess the only thing that counts) and thought this author expressed himself concisely, even though it did degenerate into a rant pretty quickly. Still, I decided to rate my (recently re-styled) site according to his criteria. Here's how I made out:
In total, I failed on 4 of 17 possible points. My score: 76.5%! Here is where I failed:
1. Large fixed-size tables.
Yes, ideally I wanted to have a box that
would scale according to browser size, but it wasn't possible on this
occasion without making my text flow into the image of me. And because I
ended up using a fixed-size box, I had to decide which users (in terms
of resolution) to cater to. I elected to focus on people who run their
browsers on a monitor of 800x600 resolution of greater. Less than that
and this site is not pretty. It's called a trade-off. Sorry. And
I didn't use a table to do it either...it's all pure CSS.
2. Unnecessary border spacing.
It actually took me a long time to get
this $%$#$ page centered on the screen, and keep those thumbtacks in
place, and the text left-justified. It's quite a trick if you ask me, so
I make no apologies for the white space on either side of the page, and
in between the entries. Quality whitespace adds to a document's impact
and makes it more readable. I'm giving myself a point back for this one.
3. pointless use of "small" or "font-size="
Small
fonts can help differentiate important information from not so important
information. For example, my purpose for using different font sizes is
to steer you to the articles on my site, not to when I wrote them. And
the only way to ensure two browsers of different origins will render
your page the way you intended is by using font-size=. Believe me, I
just finished getting a brutal education in that very thing. I'm taking
my point back here as well.
4. Masturbation with javascript
(*smile* that's a good one) OK...as
an authority...on javascript, first let me say there is no way to
masturbate with it. (what a great turn of phrase though) I am however, a
great believer in the use of subtle javascript to ratchet up the
interactivity of a site by way of random quotes, random pictures, style
and logo changers, and other silly things...sort of the way Google puts
up a different logo for each holiday. What's wrong with that? I see
where Eric is going here, but I'm still taking a point back.
5. CSS that sets fixed-size fonts dimensioned in pixels
That's really
the same as #3, so I am not going to count it at all.
So after corrections my score is now 16/17 or 94%. That's a good 34% higher than my university average! :-)
There are a ton of these types of articles out there - Web pages that Suck, Jacob Nielson, etc, so why did I pick this article to compare myself against? Because the writer is Eric Raymond, and apparently he's big in the open source community; he even puts himself up there with Linus Torvalds. I guess he's got some "cred."
But it seems that he's not arguing for good design, but instead for no
design at all. He wants his perfect world where (among other things)
content triumphs completely over style, instead of one where
style complements content and vice versa. And his site is a prime
example of his zeal. I can't help but think if his site looked better,
it would also read better, no?
I'm sure in the print world, there is a size of book that is more efficient than any other. Along the same lines, there has got to be a typeface (I don't think they call them fonts) that has been proven to be the easiest to read. Since that is the case, why are not all of the books in the world the same size and using this efficient typeface?
Enough of me asking questions. I think this site is finally doing what it was intended to do, and it pleases me and it look good to my eyes. When all is said and done, isn't that what counts the most? (that's actually another question. Sorry.)
