When I browse the web looking to purchase a service, I find there are two pretty distinct kinds of sites. One feels like it was made in the early 90’s: it’s mostly functional, almost renders correctly, and has the odd combination of distracting images and colors we thought was a good idea back then. The second kind of site is like a breath of fresh air: navigation that flows, easy to read content, effective images, and a severe discrimination against stuff like <marquee>.
Why the disconnect? Did we suddenly have a budget for planning a website beyond the back of a napkin? Did graphic designers figure out how to translate their pen and paper skills onto the web? Did the web slowly evolve into something that could provide a canvas for more than just plain text and drawing boxes with ASCII? Well, yeah - all the above. But what’s on my mind right now is the mental attitude - what I see as the mindset of the 90’s.
I suspect the first kind of site is purely legacy and only exists because of habit. It’s maintained out of habit, it has a budget out of habit, and people visit out of habit. If the site launched today with zero users it would probably remain that way until it was retired as a failure. These are not pleasing sites for either the current users or the new visitors. The only things these sites have going for them are momentum and division.
Their momentum is driven by recognition - the sites have been around so long people either know about them or they show up first in search results. This is a valuable position to be in but it’s not permanent and without proper maintenance will change.
The other leg of their shaky foundation, how they retain users, is the division. They separate themselves from the crowd by giving their users just enough reason not to leave. Often that reason is that people have already invested so much time, money, and energy putting information into the site that they don’t want to leave even if another site is substantially better. Not only does this hurt the user, it hurts the web (and thus, all of us). When people continue to use mediocre sites it continues to send the message that it’s OK to not improve and to not add value.
The second style of sites - the breath of fresh air style - is the result of a newer way of thinking. I’m not just talking about colors that don’t hurt your eyes. I’m talking about a fundamental shift of viewpoints. Integrate with other sites? Sure. Provide useful content in forms that other sites can consume? You bet. Publish API’s that let people do things you haven’t thought of? Let users export their data and do what they want with it? Share your content with a permissive license? Hell yeah.
This is what we should be demanding as users of the web. Give us accessible content. Give us thought-out workflow. Give us options. Give us value, and we’ll choose you.
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I categorize the 2 types of site differently. Those that work and those that require I enable script for functionality that shouldn’t require it. From my perspective accessible content doesn’t have anything to do with web2 API’s.
“One feels like it was made in the early 90’s: it’s mostly functional, almost renders correctly, and has the odd combination of distracting images and colors we thought was a good idea back then… If the site launched today with zero users it would probably remain that way until it was retired as a failure.”
You’ve obviously never heard of MySpace, have you?
I think you’re being a bit harsh on mediocrity. A mediocre site from the 90s that has survived this long, is probably site that works and delivers value to its users.
Over the past couple of weeks I have experience a number of sites that previously were very usable if slightly basic to the modern eye which have decided to launch updated sites which are significantly less usable than before.
e.g.
http://www.nationalexpress.com now offers auto complete of journey locations. However, if you type in London, it auto completes to “Leigh-on-Sea London Road”!! You then have to manually select the real London from the list.
http://www.sadlerswells.com now has Flash banners on the home page promoting their current productions. However, scroll around the page it now jerks annoyingly (Granted I’m not using a state of the art machine but that shouldn’t be a problem visiting sites such as these). If you want to search for events that don’t appear on the home page you are in for some pain. The calendar currently defaults to January and the next month link doesn’t do anything (I’ve tested in IE6/7 and Firefox 2/3). The search link gives the helpful message “The search feature is currently unavailable”
I was going to complain about The Lyric website as after their update I couldn’t find their very useful calendar page. But having visited it again I found it. However, their recent revamp of the site is not actually any better than their previous version and I would say it is actually a bit more clunky.
Now, I assume that these revamped sites weren’t what you meant by your second category of site. But my point is sometimes mediocre is better than the probably quite expensive updates that website go through without any discernible benefit.
I’m not saying a site needs to have Flash and/or JavaScript to be quality. In fact, I’d argue the site should provide usable fallback when they aren’t available - something that usually goes overlooked these days.
XuluWarrior: It’s true - just dropping money on a site without a plan is not the answer either. Also, flash ads lag my computer too.
I’ll be the first to admit this post got a little off topic. It was 2AM and I was frustrated from using another poorly made website but talking about exporting data was a little specific. Covering the actual title of the post would take a lot more than one post, I think.
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