Design Immaturity
Indi Young at TechSoup.org had an interesting post yesterday called Is Your Home Page Immature?
So how can you tell if your organization isn’t using its home page to best advantage? One symptom is a failure to trust your own navigation and architecture systems to direct customers to valuable information.
I’ve seen that type of “immature” designing before, but I’ve never heard it described quite that well. I’ve always disliked that sort of webdesign, but for purely aesthetic reasons. The “immature” style as Ms. Young calls it is too cluttered and fragmented for my taste. It’s the same design theory that brought us “Bold everything, it’s all important!”
I’m particularly interested in her second step in improving your site:
Think of every pixel as dynamic content. Very little on your home page - ” besides the navigation and logo, of course -” should be considered permanent.
It takes an idea that I’ve been using, and pushes it much farther that I’d ever considered. “Think of every pixel as dynamic content.” I’m going to have to revisit several of my sites with this idea in mind. What content have I been letting sit on the home page, just because it’s always been there? Definitely something to think about.
I keep messing with my sites, I have about 15 personal/professional web sites, blogs, and wikis. My blog sidebar, esp. Vaspers the Grate, gets cluttered fast. So many neat things to put on there. The test is: will my readers really find them useful, or not? Sometimes it is hard to know. I just bought The User is Always Right a book on using personas.
Comment by steven e. streight aka SpyderHost — January 29, 2007 @ 10:25 am
That’s a lot of sites. I have fewer sites where I am primary, but I also work with a number of sites I supervise to some extent. It gets complicated some times.
Comment by Douglas T — January 29, 2007 @ 7:25 pm
[...] T challenges us to reconsider our design choices in his post. Another good topic for the new year! Design Immaturity posted at Thoughts on [...]
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