Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.In other words, don’t dumb it down more than necessary, but by all means don’t over complicate things. There is a great article on the web design/development blog Smashing Magazine that portends that not implementing simple web design means the difference between keeping people on your website and having a meaningless website that drives them away. The article tends to focus on e-commerce sites and presents things from a web designer perspective, but the lessons here can be applied to most all websites and the businesses/people that run them. The idea seems simple enough, but time and time again I’ve seen web designs and web sites that start with a “simple is best” philosophy then turn into a jumbled mess as something new was squeezed in, something forgotten was later added, or something else was cajoled in to just cater to someone else. You only have a limited amount of time to catch and retain someone’s interest when they come to your site, so why work against that by presenting a paradox of choice? This doesn’t mean that your website has to be boring or devoid of information. But, it is imperative to make sure that people can easily get the information they want without having to search high and low to find it. That information should be easily attainable, but you don’t have to present all of it at once. Nobody wants to read the technical specs of your software if they are just trying to find out how much it costs. To see the difference in action, compare the websites for the hosting companies GoDaddy.com and MediaTemple.com.
Based on the design alone, which site would you be more interested in getting information from? Tags: Simple, user experience, web design
