This is the first of a series of articles called the Design of Content. In fact if their is anything I have an overwhelming passion for in my career is organizing compelling content so people can find what they are looking for quickly.

When I first got online I tried out several of the free web page programs like Tripod, Geocities, Homestead and Angelfire. The biggest advantage of those programs was it was easy for someone to set up a basic web site without having to learn everything about web design. The biggest disadvantage was they did and still provide limited control over what you can do in terms layout, navigation and extra features.  Thankfully the most popular “free web sites” people are setting up these days are blogging services like Blogspot, Wordpress.com, Livejournal, etc.  I’m thankful because they pretty much adhere to good standards like consistent navigation, a good use of white space and templates provided are usually eye pleasing color schemes.

One of the mistakes I made in the early days of learning web design was trying to create typical print design layouts on the web. I actually wanted to make web sites look like the newspapers or books. It didn’t take me long to learn each medium has it’s own set of rules. A newspaper for example doesn’t have hyper links or a call to click on anything other than to say turn to such and such page.  Print material like books, newspapers and magazine are usually easier to red at longer stretches of time whereas a web site is usually designed to grab quick snippets of information and get the job done quickly.

If their is anything we can learn from the print world it is the aspect of consistency. When people are looking for information they are not looking to solve a puzzle or play a game. They want to know how to contact someone, find a product or other piece of information quickly. Web designers have put a lot of energy into optimizing graphic file sizes and web code to insure a web site loads fast, yes even on so called, high speed connections this practice is still done however the greatest bottleneck and frustration often turns out to be the inability of site visitors to find what they are looking for.  I think some people can be forgiving on a slow connection to a point but you will never see someone as frustrated as they are when they don’t understand how to find something once they are there.  If their is a problem with a web site visitor finding something it is not their fault and they are not stupid. All too often “designers” will design based on what they know and what they think looks good.  A good analogy is in the “real world” is a traveler visiting a small town, stopping to ask for directions (which the traveler shouldn’t have to do) and having a local say, “Oh yeah, just go about half a mile and turn where the old red barn used to be!”

My personal philosophy of design is part of the word itself. Design should have signs that guides the user to where they want to go without having to think.  In 2008 SpinningSilk Multimedia plans on concentrating and offering a limited set of proven and usable web layouts. One of the best books on the subject is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. Think about your favorite web sites, the ones you visit daily and really enjoy.  Do you enjoy them because the navigation is easy and the layout directs you to the bits of information you are looking for? Consider one of the most successful companies in the world, Google has one of the most simple yet easy to navigate web sites.  Besides it’s great search results it was it’s simple clean looking web site that got everyone’s attention when other search engine sites were adding more and more features and losing white space.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under Compelling Content, Organization, branding, graphic design, web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.