Websites have come a long way. I can remember the first site I built: a simple geocities site with my name, a link and an animated gif of my signature. It was horrible, and even worse, it still exists somewhere in the ether. From this rudimentary page, I recognized one thing; web design is not nearly as easy as it looks. My background had been in traditional graphic design for print, and I was completely frustrated by my inability to put images and text exactly where I wanted them on a webpage. This was the Achilles heal of the early web. It was meant for publishing, not design.
Primarily, the main purpose of the web was to present information freely in a democratic way. Early HTML did very little to address the needs of good design. It was through the countless late nights, fueled by caffeine and ambition, that designers bent the web to their will and coerced HTML to fit their design needs. In those days designers had much to contend with: mainly underpowered computers, the lowly VGA resolution, and the 56K broadband speed limit.
When flash showed up on the web development front, designers fell in love with it. For the first time it gave them the ability to create layouts and concepts exactly as they appeared in their heads. This was great for designers, but many people could not really appreciate the flash sites they had built since flash seemed to multiply all of the technical factors that impeded static HTML layouts. This was only a decade ago, in the era sometimes referred to as Web 1.0.
Flash forward (no pun intended), and you will see a vastly different web today. Designers no longer struggle to come up with stunning layouts thanks to the advent of CSS, the widespread adoption of high-speed Internet connections, and cheap, relatively powerful computers. Flash has grown up too; it is no longer seen as simply a sizzle generator, but a robust development platform.
Better hardware may provide many solutions, but it also restarts the carousel of problems to overcome. Today, smartphones are the way that millions of people experience the Internet. In years past, websites were designed to fit on screens both 640 x 480 and 800 x 600. The creation was relatively simple: design it to fit the smaller one and it would look pretty decent on the larger. Now designers have to accommodate the smartphones, netbooks, and widescreen desktops, all with 3 widely different screen sizes. The modern web is not a one sizes fits all place, nor should it be. The main goal of the web is unchanged, and today developers and designers alike are striving to make online content even more widely accessible. The real trick is doing it with style and impact.
The Web 2.0 era has pushed to further democratize the web, putting the average Internet user in a better position to create and develop content with style. The consumer has, in effect, become a producer. Just as there was a rush to the web in the early geocities days, today one can see an eerie resemblance in the mottled mess that almost all myspace pages take the form of. When the average user is given the reigns, they will undoubtedly over-do it, cluttering a page to the point where its functionality is completely obscured. With so many tools available to produce content, most people actual believe they know how to effectively use them simply because they can. This would be like a man with a hammer assuming he was a carpenter, or a woman with a checkbook believing she was an accountant. Simply put, utility is not a substitute for experience.
It is no secret that anyone with Internet access can create a website for free. But then again anyone with a paintbrush can paint a ceiling, but I seriously doubt that it would be considered it the Sistine Chapel. Good websites require planning, organization, and a keen eye. Sometimes, when considering the design of a website, less is actually more. Figure out what your site needs, trim the fat, and keep your content lean.
The Chinese tell a story about a man who entered a snake-drawing contest. The rules were simple: draw a snake and the person who finished first would win a marvelous prize. One man sketched a snake as fast as he could and noticed that he had finished far ahead of the competition and so decided to add feet to his snake. As he finished the last foot, a man raised his hand and exclaimed, “I’m finished!” The first man interjected, “I finished before him, and I had so much time left that I added feet.” The judge looked at his drawing and replied, “ A snake does not have feet. In your effort to show off you defeated yourself.”
The moral of the story is this: you should not superfluously add things to your site to set it apart; your content should do that on its own.