your thoughts on the "perfect" website

It plays sound without my asking it to play sound.

It's very artsy and the pictures are great, however navigation should not be a puzzle. It took me a few minutes to realize there was even a navbar on the top. Good flash, but as is the case with most flash websites: it's all eye-candy.

design is a form of art, but whereas art is a purely aesthetic field, design (especially design of something technical) requires form and function. THere is more to design than just looks. What use is a furniture designer who's chairs look beautiful, but you can't sit on them because they are so damn uncomfortable? What use is an architect who creates beautiful buildings but you can't find the door to get in?

As a case in point, the millenium bridge in london is a gorgeous piece of aesthetic design, so does that mean that the bridge was well designed? Seeing as it had to be closed down after a few days and redesigned, because the original technical design was flawwed, I'm gonna say no. The aesthetic design was there, but that did not make it any good.

Beauty is a great thing and most definately is important in the visual medium of the web, but the web is not a purely visual medium. You don't just sit and look at a website, it's not a painting hanging on the wall. Plus your arguments take things to rediculous extremes. There is no black and white, beautiful and technically sound are not mutually exclusive and far too many people, on both sides of the argument are trying to force them to be so. Why? Because we all have our strengths and weaknesses and it's far easier to say "well I'm not good at art, so it's not important and I just won't bother", or "I'm not good at the technical aspects of web design, so I'll just not think about it", than it is to actually try and improve your weaknesses. To many people try to cop out.


You see, here we have to look at what perfect means. A perfect website will have all aspects of design to a high standard. Good aesthetic, fast load times, sound code, browser compatibility, standards compliance with a strategies for forwards compatibility, device independance, accessibility, useability, optimised to be user friendly first but also se friendly, intuitive UI, graceful deformation.... The list goes on and I have not even mentioned back end programming yet. A website is not a simple thing, so the definition of a perfect website is not as simple as a single word.

Listen, man. You need not tell me what art is. I'm not gonna wave my penis here and say "Look at me, I study art!", but I am going to assure you that I know more about the fundamentals of art, architecture and design then most of the people on Ozzu.

My mission is to burry all that is standard for drafts and templates ARE NOT ART, no matter how user- and se-friendly they are, no matter how spotless their code is.
And frankly... if it took you more than 5 seconds to figure out the navigation system at CMA Darkroom, that makes you s t u p i d .
Maybe standards in my country are so much different than yours that we'll never settle this.

Par example: someone from the UK asked me to design a logo for a site. But I had to do it without even seeing the website (which was to be constructed) or knowing as much as what it's about AND, I had to do it in like 3 hours. I told the man that's insane and he said "As long as you work for me, you'll do what I say!" So I made a joke of a logo and he was OK with it. Because such is life: what is genius for most of you is mediocre for us.
Over here, before we even think of designing a logo, we run extensive inquiries, do a case study, probe the market and the end-users, you know, the things REAL designers do.

And web-design is, as you also stated, much more advanced than graphic design so excuse me if I think Mr. Hey-This-Is-My-First-Website-And-I-Made-It-Last-Night-In-MS-FrontPage's site is everything BUT art.

I am radical. I want to change the world wide web. Sue me.

Ok, I think I missed the part where you specifically dissagree with me, or show me that I'm wrong, but never mind. I'll just assume you think I'm right

Whether he is stupid or not is irrelevant. If a stupid person cannot figure out the navigation system, then the site has failed. After all, it uses mystery meat navigation, which is like making highway exit signs that don't tell you the exit number and town until you merge into the exit lane.



But when it comes to Web sites, do you run usability studies as well? They are more important.



But there is some art which you don't seem to appreciate:
The artistic elegance of well-structured data.
The art of usability.
The art of well-written code, in any computer language (especially Perl).
Even the art of designing programming languages (Forth and UserRPL come to mind).
And especially, artfully-presented mathematical proofs. They are the best.

All of the above refer to artful organization of information, and artfully executed function, which is something more abstract but ultimately far more important on the World Wide Web and many other media.

What is great is that visual art and the art of organization and function are not mutually exclusive! Good design is artful in both manners, and with good design, the visual aspect augments the functional and organizational aspect!



Sure, but in what direction? If you want to take it in any direction that decreases accessibility or usability, then you want to take it in the wrong direction.



Ever read a novel?

The perfect website is the one you spend your time and put all fo your effort into making it unique.

Sam, how come they teach graphic design in art schools but not programming? Isn't that enough to prove my point? And I appreciate programing, too, for I was also a programmer a long time ago. But THINK for a second: the average user is NOT gonna look at your source code to see if you used nested tables and what-not.

Now about usability and your highway exits: is it my fault you don't know Latin? Is it CMA's fault?

Oh, realy? What if he can't read? Does that make the design faulty? I believe IQ is VERY relevant.

It must be dark and composed entirely of black and grey (in other words, it must not inflict pain on my eyes).

Most schools of art will teach graphic design but NOT much website design, if they even teach it at all. From this, using your logic, website design is not art and I think you have inadvertently, though rather elegantly, disproved your point

Anyhoo, the problem with the navigation in that site is the mystery meat nature of the navigation. You get NO indication of where the link goes until you have moused over it. This is a distinct useability flaw and even those of us with exceptional IQ's cannot see that which is invisible. No, really we can't. This has nothing to do with the intelligence of the user, its a matter of the designer not thinking about basic user needs. Simple as that.

Well, I'm glad you figured one thing out: web-design is NOT considered a form of art and no wonder... Here's a sample from Xone Design dot org:



So it's not art, but it could be. And it could be the best kind of art ever!

that conclave site has great effects.
But im not stupid, and I didn't notice the Navigation for a bit. Little arrows dont make me think its a link to other parts of the site. Especially since theres already little dots flying around etc.
The music and sound effects make the site interesting. But I also feel like it takes too much time to navigate the site in general and would leave because of that.

and I think when designing a site you should think about who its for. Most of my friends like sites that are flashy like that. I personally spend too much time on the internet already, and I feel like my time is being wasted with that stuff. I also think that plainish layouts can sometimes be even tougher to navigate. Also make the content seem boring.

Does that sound like something someone smart would say?
I rest my case.

Well not sure there is such a thing as a "perfect site".

But to me IMHO all sites should:

1) Load fast. The on-page text should be less than 10K and counting images the page size should be kept under 40K for the home page.
Images must be optimized for faster load time.

2) The site should be easy to naviagate. Use bread crumbs to let site visitors know how they got to that page. Use a site map if the website is fairly large. Have a link on all pages to the site map.

3) Make sure the page is search engine friendly. Plain HTML is best; but if you must use JavaScript keep it to a minimum. Run the page through a validator to get rid of ALL coding errors. Make sure the page is cross browser compatible. Correct all spelling errors. Make sure there are NO broken links - not one - on the entire site.

4) Use a pleasing color scheme. One that is easy on the eyes. Use dark text on a light background and light text on a dark background. Blue is the most popular color for websites, so you can't go wrong with using blue.

5) Make use of ALT and TITLE tags; but make sure the text in them actually describes the image or link in question.

6) If your site is a commercial site then remember that "Content is King". The more pages to your site the better.

7) Use hyperlinks in the body text of your sites pages; not just in the nav bar area. If you come to a keyword on one of your pages that describes another page of your site, make that keyword be a link to the other page. This will increase the other pages PageRank and its overall link popularity.

Again, if the site is a commercial site, it should have a "Resource" section where you exchange links with other webmasters.

9) A 'Perfect Site" should be considered an authority site in its particular industry. To accomplish this, have a really large site with lots of keyword rich relevant content, have lots of external links using for the anchor text the main theme of your site, LINK TO other authority sites. Get listed in as many directories as possible. DMOZ, Yahoo! Directory and the Looksmart directory are three very important ones. There are other good directories as well, a "perfect site" should be listed in these also.

10) A "Perfect" site should have page one rankings on the major search engines.

11) A "Perfect" site should have good sales ability to it. That means having a good (popular) produce to sell, having a good sales pitch and a good closing pitch for why they should buy your product.

12) A "perfect" site should put out a newsletter. In this day and age of SPAM; you will want to have an email form on your site so that visitors can opt in to your newsletter. Be sure to include at the bottom of your newsletter a way for them to opt out.

13) A "perfect" site should include articles on the theme of the site. If the site is about Entertainment, then you should have articles about the Entertainment industry.

14) It's always a good idea to offer something for FREE on your website. That will make some visitors keep coming back, refer your site to a friend, bookmark your site, etc. You can offer everything from free software to free screensavers, etc.

15) A perfect site should have ALL of the site pages fully optimized and validated - not just the home page.

16) Last a "perfect" site is a TON of work and is NEVER really done.

A perfect site is not made entirely in flash
A perfect site doesn't use 16kb of javascript for stupid stuff
A perfect site actually has a purpose
A perfect shopping site actually generates sales
A perfect site can be used by blind people and others with dissabilities.
(A perfect web designer actually takes into account that handicapped people DO use the internet)

Content, content, content. Much more important than flash and pizzaz--though fifty-seven would disagree. The internet is not tv. Nor is it the movies. The internet was built for easy access to information.