My Greatest Fear About Web Design
Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Apr 12, 2007
Web 2.0. Bask in all it's glory. There are entire style guides out there that teach you what makes a site two point oh, and tutorials to guide you in making buttons, star flashes, and reflections. My greatest fear with all of this is what I'll call the bell bottom effect. Are we going to look back on it and wonder "what were those guys thinking?
You can already see some of that if you go back far enough. Visit a web page from 1997 and you might notice a lot of blinking gifs. Hey, even apple.com didn't look so great back then!
So what trends are happening today that might be disaster tomorrow? Here's what I'm wary of:
- Star Flashes: Beta! 2.0! Coming Soon! Ug. Enough already with the Star Flashes. There are plenty of ways to be web 2.0 without having a star flash. Anyone who thinks that a star flash is a necessary part of having a modern web design is just silly. This is the equivalent of Cindy Crawford's mole. Intriguing? You bet. Worthy of copying all over the freaking place? No thanks.
- Large footers that take > 33% of the screen: I'll be the first to admit that I do use this technique sometimes, but generally I try to keep my footers using less than 10% of the default page height. When it starts getting too big it starts to take away from the main content.
- Overly rounded anything: I had a tough time tracking down examples to illustrate my point on this one so either it was never really a trend or people have realized that too much rounding can make one ill and have veered back towards better design.
- Fixed layouts: Probably the most controversial is this one. But in fairness it was never a web 2.0 trend, it's just something I'll put the brakes on now though. Fixed layouts do have their uses and I'm not trying to start a flame war, but I will say that some of the advantages to a fixed layout (performance on older systems) are not as important today as they were a few years ago. I'll be redoing just about everything I can with a liquid layout.
Did I miss anything?
This is so true. I know it’s true because when I first say web2.0 sites, I thought they looked like crap. I didn’t get the whole web2.0 thing until I saw more and more sites and then I was able to understand the pattern. When the web2.0 sites are a thing of the past, people will look back, forget the pattern, and judge that site as the tight pants-bell bottom trend that it was… and laugh.
Luke Hoersten