I recently discovered Reddit Beta, which is a working version of what will eventually be the new Reddit layout. Everyone seems to hate it.
Not so long ago, I saw something strange in my Facebook feed about a profile redesign. Everyone seems to hate it.
I've seen this all before. People hate change. So I thought back on some websites I used to visit. I rather hate how Fun Trivia operates now. The current layout is fine, not too different from what it used to be. What I don't like however, is that you can't edit your quizzes. Which is laaame, but has nothing to do with design, which is what I'm primarily dealing with today.
Snopes has redesigned their site since the good old days when I used to visit it regularly at snopes2.com. The new layout is fine. It's no longer so 90s, which is nice.
IMDB did a minor-ish redesign not too long ago. Better, but it's still crowded for my liking.
One redesign I don't much care for? Neopets. And I mean the new new version, the current one. When they made the sidebar stretch around to the top, I was fine with that. When they made that sidebar smaller, I was fine with that too. Redesigning old pets and objects, fine, because a lot of the old ones were crappy and they needed to be changed. From a design standpoint, this layout looks much newer, and again less 90s, but I'm a firm believer in the "less is more" philosophy and thus I'm a big fan of whitespace, of which this design has none.
But Reddit? Facebook? How can people put these designs down?! Reddit in particular, I thought it looked pretty awesome. And Facebook, moving all the crap people shove onto their profile onto another page? This is good from a design and a usability standpoint.
And the whole "well, you can change it, but let us choose to keep the old version!" mentality is stupid. This makes things more likely to break. If I had this option on my website, that would mean that every time I made a new layout I'd have to go back and update my old layouts, because I didn't know anything about external stylesheets when I was coding in 2000. And so, that means more work for me, so no, I ain't doin' it. It also means that people will be able to look at my old horrible layouts, which is not good.
And umm, hey. Redditors use Firefox. Firefox has extensions, as they all should know. Take a look at Grease Monkey. I've never used it, but I'm fairly certain that this extension would allow you to make changes to Reddit's stylesheet, so the site designers will be happy, new users who aren't set in their old ways will be happy, and you'll be happy.
It again just boils down to "the times they are a-changin'".
That said, I hate that in Wordpress 2.5, the categories box is hidden way down below the post, so I always forget to categorize my posts.
May 25, 2008 at 9:32 PM
Urgh, tell me about it. First Neopets, now Habbo Hotel? I have no idea how these sites can still attract visitors.
Then there's this other website, you might of heard of it, that teases its visitors with just the beginning excerpt of the webmistress' most recent blog entry, requiring one whole click to read the rest. She also has an Adsense ad area to the right of it that has no kind of border or header thingy to segregate itself, thus looking out of place.
To top it off, on the homepage, the left menu thing doesn't have any kind of margin or to separate itself from the bottom of the page, almost like it wants to continue. But it can't.