your thoughts on the "perfect" website

I rarely double post, but thought I should separate out these posts. Sorry for the rant BTW, but dumb people get me all worked up and we all know what happens then Back on topic:

What is the perfect website? Well It's the one that is designed to appropriately suit it's purpose.

If your goal is to create a shedload of money, then that is what your site should be aiming to do. Amazon, in this respect, is well designed. The number of features on amazon to try to get you to buy stuff is phenomenal and they have clearly met their goals. It may not be pretty, but Amazon would NOT be enhanced in any way by eye-candy, if anything it would detract from the real purpose of the site.

If your goal is to showcase your art, then you need a site that is also artistic, with an appropriate aesthetic and an appropriate feel, to get people into the right mood for your art. A multimedia presentation type site is perfect for this.

The perfect website is a fictional beast, not because "nothing is perfect", but because every website is different. Every website has different needs, different audiences, different goals. The job of a designer is to meet the specification, to put in what is needed and leave out what is not.

No way, man. The perfect Web site is the one that is perfectly designed to suit its purpose!

hehe, otherwise it would just be an "appropriate" website. My bad

What is wrong with you?


Your trying to say my post/opinion is invalid because I am stupid? And you say your not trying to insult anyone?

Well, the perfect website for me would take care of all the school work I have to do, clean around the house, answer any questions I have, and maybe give me a little money.
My point is that a website is only good for what it does for you. It should provide a service or provide information. The easier it is for me to find what I want the better. Sometimes graphics help with that. Pure text sites suck, they are boring and they are harder to ....parse..in you head when you look at them.



I like good looking sites, but I dont appreciate the fancy effects that the flash sites you have posted have.
http://www.aleart.net/
I was navigating the site, the effects are neat, but I didn't get what the point of the site was. All these fancy effects and strange shadowing text dont do it for me. Your site gave me nothing, at the most it could've given me was visual entertainment. I find websites dont do a good job of supplying that, TV and Video are much more effective. I am not mesmerized by these twirling particles and etc. WarCraft 3 has better looking effects and I dont go around on battle.net clicking on menus just to watch the menus scroll down the screen the way they do. This kind of flashy stuff has its place but not on most websites...DirectX and Video are a much more effective way of getting visual effects. Webpages are for accessing services and information quick and easily...

You don't?! I sure as heck do! lol. The menus are the highlight of the whole game for me!

Aleart.net? I don't know what that site is about - - I enter it and get two options, "feather" and "candle." Oh, well that's great. I click on "feather" and it opens a brand new window! How artistic.

In this new window is some movie of something. I don't know what to do. What is this site giving me? I have no idea. So then I noticed the really tiny five-pixel X inside a seven-by-seven box, and I click that. A timer starts at ten and counts down at a rate of less than a unit per second. Okay, so it's loading more information, right? No, the timer loads a window.close() and closes the window. Thanks. I really admire how it has me wait approximately twelve cryptic seconds before closing the window. That, my friends, is art. I know it when I see it. Also artistic about that timer is that they started it at ten, which is symbolic of space exploration. When it reaches zero, I get to "lift off" into closing of the window.

Then I tried clicking some other words. There was this "last opera" dealie on the right side. When I clicked that, after an artistically brief loading bar, it shows some image rapidly diminishing in size. A light of some sort is blinking on an infinite loop. Then I started to write a description of it, the images are now getting bigger! Sometimes they're rotated. And they're getting faster! Faster and faster, and then sometimes the light is blinking, and then it goes out, and then it's blinking and then it goes out, and then there are multiple images in different places or is it one image they flicker so fast I get a seizure!

Wow.

Then I have nothing to do but click on the five pixels of X inside the forty-nine-pixel square, unless I want to watch it again, but this time, instead of meaning "close the window," it means "go to the previous page," which makes so much more sense, since that's not what the other X does.

I could describe all the other parts of the site, but that wouldn't be interesting. *

Well, maybe we could look at the "candle" portion.

It opens up with a meme of brackets like [35k]]] etc. Disappointingly, the brackets aren't a nested tree structure or anything elegant; there are more closing brackets than opening ones. But being inelegant is art too.

Eventually it has an eye with a candle in it. Or maybe the eye is looking at a candle, and the candle's image is reflecting in a physically impossible large manner. Maybe that person can't afford electricity.

There are a couple of spots on my monitor for some reason; I don't know why. Eventually I'm told to enter the site.

A larger image of the candle appears. There are some new spots on my monitor. I get a paper towel to wipe them off. Oh look, I moved the mouse and more candles appeared! Now they're gone.

Eventually, you can figure out that the dots indicate navigation, so I go to learn about his life.

Facts: This person does Web design, but he/she is not a Web designer. This person communicates through sensation. Since the computer can't produce smells or electrocute me, I guess that would be through the sensation of sight. What a novel idea! Other information is provided as well, with fullstops omitted for artistic reasons.

Anyway, that is an awesome site. I especially enjoy it opening a window with only my Prefsbar appearing, the other toolbars omitted. Waiting extra time for windows to close is also artistic, although having it start at nine and counting a bit more slowly would be more to my tastes; ten is too haughty a number. I appreciate that gesture, because it's not art unless it takes necessary time from my life.

Thank you for sharing that; I change my views on art now. We should all make our sites' navigation as byzantine as possible, too. Or, to have individuality solely for individuality's sake (as all true artists do), maybe make the navigation not be byzantine. Maybe on my next site, I'll use radially symmetric crosses for navigation, instead of dots or pathetic things like hyperlinks. Or I could do minuses. I better consult my handbook on normal Web design, and then do something completely different.


* However, I find it interesting how the "No Illegal Sex" portion of the site recommends letting people die.


(edited for spelling)

holy crap that site sucks

Sam Hughes, you've got an awesome sense of humor. lol

1) Loading that takes not more than 5 seconds and NEVER causes a freeze. (I have had
some japanese sites that caused me to freeze, that is ugly IMO).
Of course, it would be best if the loading takes 1-2 seconds at max.
2) Helpful for the eyes. I want to recognize what i want to see, i want information,
i dont want ad (which i annoyingly must put away via adblock or
3) Small flash things are ok and can be quite nice but on a serious site I do NOT want Java
nor Flash. I have oh so often seen them used as advertisement, and this forces me to
quickly adblock them in firefox.
3) Allows user to customize, for example simply put via templates. I in general prefer
black background and white font. At times, white background and black fonts are ok, with
some color aiding.
4) Good scaling context, ie usage of em instead of px and so on
5) Conforming to open standards, not to proprietary ones like MS.
Some things by MS werent a bad idea, but i never want to see the development of the whole
web controlled by any single company.


ozzu has a good design, one of the better forums i was on so far.
Some sites of eric meyers are also nice, and some other css experts are fine.

The best sites i saw were with flash actually, but as i pointed out above i really
honestly dislike if a site is written in flash, and i have plenty of reasons why.



Last but not least, no... certainly most important.
For me the most important aspect is the way how i can get to new information.
I used to read a lot of books, nowadays i read a lot on my screen, and i
have an odd reading-technique. Isnt the best, but then again my eyes are neither
very good.

something. On my editors, this is usally 80 characters.

Now, my whole screen is about 140 chars, and on the 80 characters i am a bit mixed...
i look at about 35 chars, then scroll downwards. That is, for me, the fastest
way to read and select information I like to see.

Ok, that's a bit lengthy... the basic point is, that, if a site offers information,
the most important aspect is that i can easily read through it.
I hate width:100% via lines :>