This is amazing..
By: Brett
I wonder sometimes, when building a new site, does design even matter that much? Sure there are things like making sure the navigation and certain elements are easy to find.. I get that. But do the actual designed elements of the site even matter? Take a look at www.paparazzi-boutique.com and tell me if you find that at all visually appealing? At first glance to me, I was repulsed. There are so many bad things going on with the site, but the navigation is relatively easy to find, the basic functions of the site work, and it loads alright.
Reena took a look at this site and couldn’t see anything wrong with it. She thought it was fine and couldn’t understand why I had such a problem with it. Granted she does spend 10 hours on Myspace everyday, so her idea of “design” is a little skewed. Now what really gets my blood boiling with a site like this is how someone can pay a company to design and develop something like this, and then on top of that, go back to this company and have them develop a shopping cart system as well.
Does the average user, the main visitor of a site, really care if the site is visually appealing, or do they just care about getting the information they need? Does it matter how that information is delivered? Has Myspace ruined any progress that the design world has tried to make in the last 10 years?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 11:58 amand is filed under Computers, Web Design, Daily Rants. 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.
“This is amazing..”
March 4th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Unfortunately as web designer/developers ourselves, we may be in the minority. I can see how someone looking at that site would view it as “ok” (if only, barely). I in fact boycotted myspace in the very beginning for this fact alone, that myspace was a disgrace to those who hold the web at a high standard. I would explain this to friends when they asked what my myspace page was, and I would just get back blank stares. I shudder to think that our generation may lose their sense of “taste” because a horribly designed website is popular among their friends.
I think there will always be a place for people with real “taste”, as it’s sometimes called. I think people will always pay for that. However, it happens all too often that someone thinks they are paying someone who has good “taste”, and in not having good “taste” themselves, are unable to identify that their shit blows. And that the person they’ve hired to have good “taste” for them, actually blows as well. Case in point (http://danfia.com/). WTF?
I recommend you read Paul Graham’s “Taste” essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html In it he says “Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is, it’s not true. You feel this when you start to design things.”
So true.
I’m glad you wrote this post, I love any discussion around this topic.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
for the record i love my myspace page, thanks 2u brett, i totally see a difference after you made it pretty, than to what i had..LOL
but i just wanted to say I see what you mean…i dont ’see’ what you see when you we look at a website. but over the years i have seen what you have done and b4 n after sites, especially with my dads sites and i now see the difference. and as a user of the internet i care what a site looks like (to an extent), well unless its Victoriasecrets.com or Juicy.com then i could care less what it looks like long as i can find the shopping cart!!!
but i will say i would have never really cared about a site design if i didnt know you and you pointed things out to me that look funky…maybe thats bc i didnt go 2 skool 4 that or maybe that is just ME!!
April 19th, 2008 at 3:49 am
Hmm, doesn’t really do anything for me. But then again if it brings in the money who am I to be critical. I worked for Channel 7 Media London and we had three designers and only one developer, that was me, a junior at that. Problem there was that the big money circa £60,000 was for .net applications,Component Management Systems and E-commerce Sites which doesn’t really call for great designers.