The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

Harmony v cacophony --- Most web designers are unconsciously incompetent about standards.

In the previous entry, I offer the opinion that few people can tell a good website from a bad one and that, about ten years after the emergence of the web, many sites are still terribly wrong.

Like in music where there is a quasi infinite variety (from concertos to pop songs, from cool jazz to hard rock, from pentatonic Celtic folk music to opera), there are many sorts of websites, from simple one-page sites with contact info to cascading multinational compositions looking like intricate oil refineries.

• Good websites are fluid constructions offering harmony, tempo and rhythm. Examples of good sites and of useful features: amusing personal sites, practical info services; SME sites with de facto standard menu bars; sites offering clearly what visitors expect; simple designs; relevant pictures and multimedia documents; one-click shopping capabilities with email follow-up with relevant links to check progress; intuitive navigation with indication of position within the site; balanced blend of text, illustrations and colours.

Amazon.com is still among the best. See my analysis of the site in an entry of last August. To me, the e-commerce aspects of the site are close to perfection, setting the standards for shopping on the web. Otherwise, the site is very good, maybe a tad too cluttered to my taste. And the algorithms setting personal recommendations need fine tuning: they are confused by the fact I buy items in multiple categories and what they propose to me tends to become a messy potpourri.

• Bad sites are awkward assemblies imposing cacophony, inconsistencies and chaos. Examples: pompous corporate brochure sites making it very difficult to understand what the company actually does; hollow government site with broken links to useless info; e-commerce sites where it’s impossible to check out; sites that take ages to come up, even with broadband; hysterical home pages looking like Tokyo by night; intricate multi-level navigation; confusing contents; horrible graphic design; and so on.

Let’s move away from music and take books as analogy. Books have been with us for centuries and they follow fairly clear standards for both form (front page, chapters, paragraphs, table of contents, credits, etc.) and contents (grammar, syntax, unity of style, etc.). Since the mid 1990s, de facto standards have emerged for websites, including main horizontal menu bar, about us, contact, etc.). My friends at the Nielsen Norman Group have published a lot on this subject.

Unfortunately, too many website designers and most of their clients are still at what is called the unconscious incompetence level: they don’t know what they don’t know. That’s why there are still so many horrible websites out there.