Mark Condon’s Personal Rules For Webdesign

If you were to take a poll of all of the jobs possible to mankind, and I mean ALL of them, certain jobs are going to be up there on the difficulty scale, like being a trapeze artist, or one of those guys who rides the motorcycle in the ball at the circus, or one of those people who assemble sky scrapers. Those are difficult jobs. Web designer isn’t really that difficult of a job. And yet for not being that difficult there certainly are a lot of ways to screw it up. Now I have to say right off the bat, my stuff isn’t that great. I’ve made a lot of these mistakes myself, but it’s only from making those mistakes that I learned. And trust me I’ve been doing this for a long time so there have been a lot of mistakes. I’ll limit this to 5 rules though.1) in your domain Content may or may not be king, but on the web style is god.
So I usually don’t like to think about this, because most of the time I don’t think about my design until afterwards, which of course leads to some problems. Most people who will come across your site aren’t going to be web designers; instead they’re going to be the lay people that spend most of their time myspacing, buying things, and well getting lost on the internet… Or whatever people who wander the internet do. When they come across a website that looks like it was made in 1999, they’re going to shudder for a second or two and click somewhere else; at least having a semi interesting style to your website is going to keep traffic on your site longer than having plain black text on a white screen. Take a look at a couple myspace pages, if that’s what people think is a good design for their own “page”, then at least having a little bit of color that goes together, which a few rollovers is going to keep anyone’s attention. Then when you know that they’re going to stick around, keep them there with some gripping content. Let’s be honest about this, as interesting as the things you have on your website are, I’m probably not going to take the time to look at them if you’re site is using a neon green text on a black background.

2) Useless Social Network Clutter
Alright, so I don’t want to be sending the wrong message, I like certain aspects of the web 2.0 craze, I like Digg, I like Flickr, I like Delicious and all the rest. What I don’t like is when everyone thinks that their articles are automatically Digg worthy because more than 5 people look at them, sure I will submit a blog page or two to something like Stumbleupon to drive a little bit of traffic my way, but it’s not ever post I make and I don’t ask my users to submit my pages to those type of services. Case in point, one of my favorite web comic websites has this on every blog post the person who runs the site makes.

|I really can only hope that other people find these things as annoying as I do. It’s pointless, half of these services I’ve never heard of!

3) Building sites for 1024 or larger
So I don’t see this that often but when I do it’s a little enraging. My macbook at home has a max resolution at something like 1024, or 1280 I can’t really remember off the top of my head. But when I find a website that exceeds these dimensions makes me a little angry, mainly because they don’t have the courtesy to be designing to me, they’re potential user. I always stay within the 800 x 600 dimensions if I think that anyone out there will be viewing my website with an older computer, even if there’s only a slight chance I generally do this, just so that they’re not being excluded because they have an older machine, or are running a specific type of smaller system, like the Asus Ee Pc or the OLPC.

4) Javascript, Ajax, Flash, oh my!
So if you’ve ever seen my website, it usually incorporates some sort of technology that not everyone has access to. Some people who are running Internet Explorer can’t view certain scripts I’ve written with javascript, some people don’t have the speeds to wait for a huge flash file to load. And because of that we shouldn’t make all of our content only available through these mediums, there always should be the low tech work around. Denying users content solely based on what they have is foolish, although it all too often happens.

5) Hidden Google Ads
I’m not really sure who came up with this first, but I must admit despite my hatred, and anger who ever the first person who thought to hide his Google ads into his normal navigation and content is a little bit of a creative genius, I just wish that he or she would have spent their time developing something good, as opposed to making something good. This is just one of those things that shouldn’t be allowed on the internet, like tables with no background, or animated gifs that sparkle. If you’ve ever considered doing this. You just shouldn’t, there’s never a reason to do it.

Hope this has been interesting and helpful!