Dan rants: Web Critique & Information design

With my spare cycles (ha!) I want to do a redesign of the Flutterby site.

I've got a couple of reasons for this:

• The plain HTML stuff is kind of dated. I want alook with some graphics and borders to impart a little more of my personality.
• I want to move people between the various different portions of my site. Many visitors to my whitewater pages never discover the weblog and vice-versa. This means making more links immediately visible on each page, but doing that without obscuring the actual content on the page is key.
• I want to be respectful of a couple of different levels of browsers, to scale nicely so that those browsers that deal with table alignment and such correctly get captions on images, while not alienating users of other systems.

One of the critical elements of design is that it's always for a specific audience. Computer Shopper is garish and busy because it's meant to evoke the same sort of "everything's a bargain" and "we've got too much stuff" feeling of the photo and electronics stores that plague tourist cities. Need To Know is plain and monospaced because it's targeted towards the old guard of computing who used paper terminals and liked them.

So I've been keeping notes as I go through various sites to see what I like and what I don't like.

I used the Golden Gate Ferry web page to find schedule information. After a bit of head scratching I figured out that the schedules are a button under "commuters". That I'd already clicked once from the Golden Gate Transit page made that three clicks and a bit of head-scratching. I'd guess that 90% of the people going to that page are looking at ways to get where they're going, not at history. Kudos for making sure everything's got "alt" tag text, raspberries for not making the first thing people come to your site for immediately obvious. This site is created by Nosh Productions , which, interestingly enough, doesn't have a "webmaster" mail alias. Hmmmm...

Also in the "hard to find what you're looking for" department, I saw a discussion in which MindRover was mentioned. This site is an entrance tunnel which leads to CogniToy , which then has a "MindRover" button, at which point it starts to become obvious that this is some sort of computer game, but it still takes several clicks and a bunch of wide graphics to figure out what sort of computer game (No, I didn't click that far, I started to read the backstory, it sounded lame, I abandoned it).

Graphic design wise, I like what Ain't It Cool News does to break free of the tyranny of rectangular tables. I also like what Todd's been doing with the "Dr. Seuss"ish look to Coyote Grits . I want a more organic look, so I'm playing with ways to make border graphics less rigid.

Command lines are hot! A search box on the front page is a necessity if there's any level of content at all. But I already knew that.

Anyway, I just needed a place to park some ideas.

Saturday, January 22^nd, 2000 danlyke@flutterby.com