Cool Cherry Cream

Post #22 in the Blogathon

I think I'm done with the fake secrets, at least for now. It was fun, and I realized today I'm in more of a visual-artistic mood than verbal-artistic. My sci-fi story I'd originally thought about writing would have been fun, but if I'm not in the mood to write, I'm in the mood to write, and that's that.

Maybe I'm just not in the mood to write without a purpose. So, rather randomly, I decided to describe some website design mistakes I've made in the past, most many many times.

Look at some of these past layouts for my various websites. Notice anything in common?

Other than the fact that they're all fairly ugly and designed for a 800×600 screen resolution, they are just plain bad from a usability standpoint. Where's the content? In a little box. All of these layouts have a little scrolling box for the content that takes up less than 50% of the screen.

I don't know how many times I've told people that your layout really doesn't matter all that much. Content, content, CONTENT! Without content, you have no reason to have a website. So WHY is the content the smallest part of the site, visually?

Because I'm an idiot, that's why.

Another mistake that goes along with this is the fact that if you have a website, you've never actually used it. You've written the articles or put the pictures there, you don't need to go use your website to get information because you know it. This is very bad but also very common.

The reason why none of my websites have scrolling div layers anymore is because one day I decided I actually needed to use one of my websites, and found it was terribly difficult because I had to scroll waaay too much!

And another thing: remember, users are lazy. They don't like scrolling, they don't like clicking. Don't make them do anything if they don't have to.