Summary Design Delays Graphics Navigation Chunks Content Distractions Futures References

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Design

Tailor the design to the audience and the application.

What's the purpose of your Website? To communicate? To project an image? To express a personal vision?

Depending on your goal, your design philosophy will fall into one of the three main schools of Web design.

Three Schools of Web Design

School	Description	Appropriate Sites	Gurus
Avant-Garde	Visually striking, unusual layout. Not easy to use.	Personal, artistic and experimental sites	projectcool, David Siegel,
High-Class	Good taste, appropriate graphics, well designed, expensive.	Institutional and corporate sites (especially marketing), "permanent" documents	Yale C/AIM Web Style Guide
Efficiency	Minimal graphics and gadgets, strong navigation and organization. Efficient. Cost-effective.	Reference documents, internal publications, drafts, -- anywhere content is more important than image.	Jakob Nielsen, All Things Web

The Avant-Garde School

Pro:

• The shock troops of technology: they try every new feature, tool, and possibility.
• Wonderful source of ideas -- to see what works and what DOESN'T work.
• Appeals to the young and the bold.
• Typical background: art, graphics, hacking.

Con:

• Appears as flashy, weird, and far-out, compared to the High-Class school.
• Appears as wasteful, ineffecient, and distracting, compared to the Efficiency school.
• Many of the advanced tools and techniques are only useful in a few situations in the hands of a skilled designer.
• When the tools and techniques are used poorly, they produce spectactularly bad Web sites (garish, unusuable, unreliable, expensive).

The High-Class School

Pro:

• The consolidators: they take the innovations of the Avant-Garde and implement them tastefully and carefully.
• Projects an image of quality, solidity, and permanence. Inspires confidence.
• Ideal for marketing brochures and annual reports. Good for the sites of consultants and authors. Good for introducing a major site (with the bulk of the information delivered in a utilitarian fashion).
• Typical background: publishing or marketing.

Con:

• Appears as boring and stuffy, compared to the Avant-Garde school.
• Appears as expensive and overly complex, compared to the Efficiency school.
• For delivering most kinds of information, the traditional school requires too much overhead.

The Efficiency School

Pro:

• The engineers: a rational, cost/benefit school to delivering informations so it meets the needs of users.
• Easy for non-specialists to create and maintain pages that are usable.
• Appropriate for the overwhelming majority of information, in which content is more important than packaging.
• Typical background: journalism, technical writing, engineering, science, academia.

Con:

• Appears as boring and minimalist, compared to the Avant-Garde and High-Class schools.
• The value of this school only becomes apparent over time. People don't say "Wow" about a utilitarian website; they just bookmark it and return to it again and agin.

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Last updated: Mon Jun 17 13:17:18 PDT 2002