Where is web design today?

Many people now rely on the web as a source for their lifestyles; research, maps, gossip, movie rentals, shopping. Now that this tool is so heavily used I thought it would be good to think about where it started, and where it is today from a design perspective. In the early days websites were pretty horrible to look at, lots of blinking, flashing things, dancing hamsters, BIG FONTS, red text on black backgrounds etc… (I could go on, but I know some of you are already getting nauseous. Thankfully most of the world wide web has moved past designs like these:

But has design moved forward? Clearly sites are more content oriented with the emphasis on search engines. Sites tend to be better organized, and searchable because they tend to use a content management system. Web publishing is more accessible with the convenience of Blogs, and photo sites like Flickr.

Unfortunately most of the positive steps were side effects. Sites didn’t start adding content because they wanted to communicate better, but to grab SEO points. Sadly the only reason to have a site is to communicate with potential customers. It took Google looking for content to force content into websites. With the advent of content came content management systems (CMS). With so much content on sites they needed an easy way to catalog, organize, and update it and the result was the use of databases and dynamic content was born. Now as the web has grown, so has the use of CMS. Blogs and photo album sites have brought content from everyones’ personal computers to the internet. Now even grandma can publish websites per-se. Writing diary entries, adding photos, and presenting your thoughts and ideas to the world. Of course none of these benefits are a better looking web. Graphic design is still an after thought in many cases, if it’s considered at all.

With the new easy-to-produce web comes a new batch of web developers who are convinced that because they can do it means they should. As you can see from the sites above making web production easier…can result in some pretty strong reasons for increasing the difficulty of web development to staggeringly difficult levels.

Now take my site as an example. I cater specifically to the organization of content, and the ease of navigation. The appearance is somewhat conservative to aid the user in finding what they want without having to learn a new interface. The results is a simple straight-forward design. I chose to enhance this basic framework with a few flourishes of the artist’s paintbrush, but all in all it’s a simple website. Is this bad? Because it is organized like a blog, is it devoid of design? Because I chose to maintain a fixed width and eschewed Flash for the main interface did I sell out?

I feel that even though a site isn’t flashy, obtuse, or complex it isn’t necessarily boring. There is an elegance to simplicity, consistency, and user focused design. The real trick is making it elegant, slick, flashy, and keeping it usable.

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