19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website
19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website is a bit of an obnoxious rant from webmaster Josiah Cole, but worth a read. If you work in web already, none of this will be new, but if you're a designer who is a web novice, there are some good points. What surprises me most about these designers is that they ask for and implement things that they themselves find annoying as personal users (popups, resizing, etc.). An article like Cole's is useful for non-tech readers in that it establishes a connection between the designer and the developer—both parties can and should be interested in accessible design and smooth user interface. I do disagree with Cole's #6, however. There is no reason that traditional print designers cannot learn to be good designers for the web, as long as they recognize and respect that they're working within a separate genre where different design and production rules apply. [via Subtraction]
posted by kate at 1:10 PM
5 Comments:
Well, he breaks some of his own rules. Where is *his* navigation, for instance? I came in on a content page, and found no immediately obvious way to click to the front. Ugh.
He also missed Rule 20: if you've got a website with some of the garbage he mentions, start by firing yourself. You failed to make your design requirements clear.
all true. he's an ass, no question. i debated about whether to post this one at all, but... he does have some good (if stale) points and the novice web designer (a category that lots of print design readers of this blog fall into) does need to hear those points. i dunno... feelings are still mixed. sigh.
I have a great respect for good design and designers, but that said, this article makes a few very good points. I wouldn't categorize them all as absolute rules, however, and there are a few I would add, from my own experience:
1) Print designers need to make sure they understand web typography before designing a website. Screen media type need to be at least 11pt, readably contrasted with the background, and in one of the handful of web fonts. That's it, no exceptions. And you should not use images for anything but header text.
Many nuances of typography cannot be replicated on the web, and there's no point in trying.
2) Screen size is variable. Don't assume that your users have high resolution widescreen Macs. Also, your layout PSD might be of fixed dimensions, but browser windows aren't. People resize them. Think about what you're going to do with the space beyond your layout document borders.
3) It's wise to design the function of an interface before figuring out how it will look. Because interfaces are made to be used more than thy're made to be looked at. Books are an easy interface because the navigation is obvious: you just flip the pages. Is the navigation of your website as obvious? It should be.
4) Don't design a website in InDesign. Don't design a website in Illustrator. If you're comfortable in InDesign, that's great, because it's a great print design tool, but it is not a good tool for web design. Paper, pencils and pens are of course primary, but you should work on your interface and its elements in a program that's suited to screen design and display. The most obvious here is Photoshop. Displays are RGB, not CMYK.
That's all I've got.
I have one more helpful suggestion:
5) Lorem ipsum--placeholder text in general--will only hurt your design. Text, "copy," isn't just an abstract shape, and you should never think of it as such. It's there to be read first. And it's very important to use real text if the content on your site is updated or changed with any regularity, because text is not necessarily going to be of an ideal length and shape. How would your blog look with a very short headline? What if there were an exceptionally short article or article summary? The sooner you challenge the world of ideal that's so tempting to create in a prototype design, the better. If you're redesigning an existing website, use text from the current design and see how your design would look in a real world scenario. If you're starting from scratch, try to use text from a similar site, or a site that's going to work in a similar way.
Excellent comments -- thanks, Sam!
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