WEBSITE DESIGN

PART 1

For some reason, web design makes me think of water faucets. Because it seems like I'm forever encountering faucets whose designs are so poor that their functionality is impaired. Handles that are perfect spheres - attractive when dry but impossible to adjust with soapy hands. Faucets that extend over the basin so little that it's impossible to get your hands under them. And how about those brilliant motion sensor designs: the only way to activate them is to raise your hands above the lip of the basin (where the sensor can see them), resulting in the water splashing all over the countertop. Guys, when in doubt, just give me a good, basic faucet and be done with it. I'm not there to admire its beauty; I just wanna wash the pee off my hands.

During the time I was screwing up my own site, I got to thinking about the various aspects of designing a good webpage. What follows are some of my conclusions (and offered for free, no less).

When you're making your first webpage, there is a tendency to try to do too much with the various colors available. My first design featured yellow text on a navy-blue background. Young web designers think bright text on a dark (often black) background is being brilliant and creative, since it's different from what they've seen on Amazon.com and Yahoo! It doesn't occur to them that maybe the designers of Amazon.com and Yahoo! knew what they were doing when they avoided such nonsense. Even worse, it seems every newcomer to the web has the exact same ideas, with the result being that their sites all look alike. And, unfortunately, they've often spent more time worrying about their color scheme than about the actual content on their site. What would be your first thoughts if you opened a book in a bookstore to find every page had a black background with light-colored text?

Then there was the message board I visited which had bright green text on a white background. What in the world would ever possess someone to arrive at that particular color combination as the ideal solution to his problems? As I read the messages being sent back and forth as if the board was normal, I wondered if I was the only one on the site who hadn't completely lost his sanity.

When I visited one young woman's homepage, I encountered a page on the site that had a black background. Which wouldn't have been quite so bad if the text hadn't been black, also. Needless to say, it was kind of hard to read (the only way you could tell there was text present was to click and drag the mouse to highlight it). She later assured me it was accidental, but I think she might have stumbled onto something here. Imagine, you could post secret messages to your friends right out in the open, just by making the text the same color as the background. And the black-on-black approach could represent the goth phase of web design...

HTML, by its very nature, results in page designs which are blocky and divided up into rectangular sections. As a reaction to this, many designers try to break this boxiness down and make the page flow together better by adding rounded corners, overlapping graphics and images, and so on, even if it means going out of their way to do so. There's admittedly some of that going on on this site, and to an extent I think such details can add to the visual appeal of the design. But I've seen too many sites which go out of their way to include bizarre curves and strange bulges in their layouts. Not only do these adornments serve absolutely no function (other than the designer shouting "Look how non-boxy I'm being"), but usually they're downright ugly and the page would look better without them. Guys, when in doubt, just give me a good, basic faucet...

If you want to use PageMule and GoLiv, that's certainly your business, but be aware that HTML is not difficult to learn. In fact, you can almost certainly go to any website advertising itself as "HTML for beginners" and learn everything you need for a basic website in an evening. Let's face it people, you've got 13-year-old Britney Spears fans coding their own homepages - how hard can it be? Unnecessary clutter like JavaScript (of which this site has plenty) can be learned later.

The big problem with using the commercial HTML editors is you lose a sense of what you're doing in terms of the HTML coding. In other words, even though you now have your own webpage, you're still basically clueless when it comes to understanding what's going on. I once spent literally twenty minutes trying to explain to someone why the beautiful page they laid out in GoLiv was going to look absolutely awful if the user surfed in with an 800x600 screen resolution. Another person couldn't understand why individuals whose browsers couldn't handle Java weren't able to access her menu links, which the software had, unbeknownst to her, written as Java Applets. If your next question is "What on earth is a Java Applet?", you know as much about it as she did.

Everyone resents Microsoft's dominance in the software market, so it's natural to start out preferring Netscape's browser. And, in fact, I still use Netscape 4.7 to do most of my surfing (primarily because it has all of my bookmarks and I don't want to bother changing them over to IE), but I have to reluctantly admit that writing HTML has taught me that IE is a more robust product. Meaning it has fewer bugs. Among Netscape's problems, but by no means all-inclusive, are the following: Any image used as a link must be immediately followed by a line break tag, otherwise an annoying underscore character shows up on the page adjacent to the image. (I've actually seen a couple of professionally designed business sites exhibiting this problem, meaning the designer either never viewed the page in Netscape or just didn't consider it worth fixing.) In IE, if you designate a frame as being 180 pixels wide, by golly the frame you get is 180 pixels wide. This concept seems to have eluded the Netscape designers, whose browser consistently provides a frame slightly narrower than specified. Netscape also occasionally has fits with horizontal rules (those lines across the page often used to separate one section from the next), such as when the rule is included in the center column of a three-column table. The most discouraging part is they're now up to version 4.7, and these bugs are still every bit as evident as they were back in 3.0. And if anyone out there knows something I'm doing wrong, please - enlighten me.

Regardless of what you think of them, you have to design for the Netscape and IE browsers because together they represent over 95% of the browsers which will visit your site. The remaining 5% is composed of a variety of browsers, some of which you'll never hear of until they show up in your site's access logs. Which raises a question I've been pondering lately: What, exactly, is a "Gulliver"?

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