61 well said

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

Thanks jeffrey, I’m going to be quoting you on this.

posted at 07:43 pm on November 27, 2007 by lisa kovacevich

62 Fascinating

>Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.<

This is probably the most clear and accurate definition I’ve come across. Superb article.

posted at 05:35 am on November 28, 2007 by Michael Becker

63 Search and click

Remember those websites where you started off with an image map of an office… and clicking on the telephone took you to the contacts page, the drawers of the file cabinets led to various topical sections, the photo sitting on the desk brought you to the photo gallery? And there was a “what’s new” page… you got to that with a click on the newspaper. Oh…

I used to have a couple of those. I hope someday we grow into this medium. I’m still working on it.

But let’s not break our hearts expecting the world at large to recognize the invisible foundations of good design. Because when it works, it fades into the background. And all those eyes will be pinned on that website with the long legs and spike heels.

posted at 02:37 pm on November 28, 2007 by Beth Helmling

64 do the right thing, regardless

I liked this thought provoker.

Those trying to satisfy needs know that sites evolve over time and for many reasons.
It need not however be graceful, although I suppose this depends on the quality and forethought of the initial work. It also relies on a perception of quality being shared amoungst all those that have a say.

One thing we do know though is that web design enables us to communicate to all and that we should abide.

posted at 04:35 pm on November 28, 2007 by richard trussler

65 The Highs and The Lows

Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn also got me thinking of how web design relates to architecture. One parallelism mentioned by others was the concept of fast and slow layers. In architecture, the layers go from the more permanent foundation and structure up to the almost fluid furniture in the room. In web design, it goes from IA up to the copy.

I think Brand’s ideas around High Road and Low Road buildings can also be applied to web design. But I haven’t seen them talked about yet in this context.

On the Low Road side: Just like function-focused, utilitarian buildings, quick-and-dirty websites can be made with little investment and more easily changed to suit the evolving situations. This ease of change along with limitations of a Low Road building or website promotes innovation on a small scale to meet the needs of its users. If And even if it’s easier to change, it’s more critical that those who follow the Low Road must meet the user’s immediate needs. Yet if something does go wrong, duct tape can be used to patch things up.

On the High Road side: Grandiose buildings require care and attention of dutiful owners over successive generations, or they will begin to crumble. Major changes are often hard and expensive to make, and are often heavily constrained by what already exists. But each building has its own unique character and has features that just aren’t available with a Low Road building. They stand the test of time. The same goes for High Road websites. If things go wrong with a High Road building or website, problems must be attended to properly. If not, degradation quickly brings you to the point of no return.

One size does not fit all. If we identify which roads our websites follow, it could help define the best approach to take when we find problems or need to make changes. Maybe there’s another pattern book in there somewhere :)

posted at 10:40 pm on November 28, 2007 by Murray Thompson

66 Re: The Highs and The Lows

I agree with the notion of high-end and low-end websites, that’s pretty straight forward; there will always be large and small projects. But I don’t agree that the low-end quick and dirty website should be a patch work system of metaphorical duct tape.

I’m talking more about front end CSS/XHTML development rather than back end php/mysql. In my experience when a site is built on a solid framework using semantic/clean markup it’s very easy to maintain and saves a load of time with debugging.

When developing sites in high volume you notice a pattern of files you need to use, and over the years those files get more and more refined and stable. Creating a starter site, for me, has been extremely helpful in streamlining the development process and the time you save not having to debug can be used for enhancements.

So, I wouldn’t immediately default to the mentality of the “quick and dirty” website. Take some time, create a set of starter files and a clean structure with a file naming convention that makes sense to you (and to others) and your next “quick and dirty” project can turn out to be pretty fast and clean.

-Tim

posted at 11:24 pm on November 28, 2007 by Tim Wright

67 RE: The Highs and The Lows

Perhaps I shouldn’t have used “quick-and-dirty”. I was trying to describe something that can go up without much investment and be easily changed without many side effects to the system. “Quick and flexible” may have been better.

I should have pointed out that Low Road doesn’t neccessarily mean small or low quality. A Low Road building could be a warehouse converted to a office building converted to luxury studio apartments.

And I totally agree that clean, semantic markup as well as insight through experience can help create a more flexible framework from the get-go. This may be more of a Low Road approach.

For Low Road website, the “duct tape” isn’t a temporary, slip-shod, must-fix-it-for-real-later solution. It is the proper solution: easy, fast, and cheap, and things work as desired. Need to patch a wire through the wall? Grab a hole saw. Need to change the header style on all those pages? Change the CSS style.

For a High Road website the duct tape approach could be used, but it won’t work well. Patching the wire in the High Road building requires you use a jackhammer or route it up and down and around passageways. Changing the header style for the High Road website means updating the CSS style, but also the archived pages with font tags the style was based on, the code generating dynamic content using a related an inline style that had to be used for some reason, and getting the five levels of approvals to do all of it.

Perhaps all websites should aim for the Low Road approach? I’m not sure if that can always be done— some things are just High Road and always will be. But recognizing where you are will help put together a more realistic estimate of effort required and in deciding if you actually need to move to an entirely new site.

posted at 04:26 am on November 29, 2007 by Murray Thompson

68 High Road/Low Road

Low Road architecture: building types like industrial lofts, prefabricated warehouses, barns, frame houses, tents. These are expedient structures, easily modified to suit new uses, and easily disposed of. Today, many of them, like the Quonset hut, the corrugated-sheet warehouse, and the mobile/modular home are built of pre-assembled components.

High Road architecture: building types like courthouses, churches, and museums. The building’s symbolic value matters as much or more than its functional performance. They set the tone for a community. Their facades implicitly convey the values of the organizations that commissioned them.

So yes, low road does suggest adherence to Web Standards, and separation of form and content, and modular design at all levels. Also the use of highly-structured typographic grids in the best traditions of print publication design.

But high road? Maybe a Flash-heavy movie site. Maybe the artist’s experimental website that consists mainly of text floating about, something driven by Processing perhaps. But those lack dignitas and permanence.

Then again, the whole Web lacks permanence. The investment in a website is many orders of magnitude lower than that in the most basic of buildings. So why look toward architecture at all?

posted at 07:41 am on November 29, 2007 by David Ramos

69 Thanks, J-Z / The Importance of Travel

This was a great article, Jeff. You put some things into words I’ve been thinking all week but couldn’t get out.

High/Low Road debate: I don’t think I’d invest in any form of architecture that was unstable, at least not sober. Like Murray pointed out, Low Road/High Road doesn’t mean dirty or unstable. I deal with a number of clients who want ‘quick-and-dirty,’ — scratch that: ‘cheap-and-dirty‘ websites as fast as possible.

Oddly enough, if Low Road lends to being more flexible and faster to modify, then Low Road might mean the more expensive in terms of time and money, it might not. I believe a lot of it depends on the client and the firm/designer.

I am not a design student and have no formal design training but I do design for the web and I tire of hearing print and ‘web’ designers alike complain about issues like Jeff described.

I believe that design is problem solving, which may or may not lend to non-linear aesthetics. If my client’s goal is to increase the generation of sales leads from their website, I’m much less worried about having an animated Flash-based logo that materializes from a rotating fluid mass of monotone, half-transparent, organic shapes — and a bit more worried about IA, accessibility, usability, and even more so: motivating my client’s target audience to take action.

There seems to be a ton of ‘designers’ in all industries that want to break the mold by ignoring the need for their designs (good examples of this are some of the challenges on the show Project Runway). The passion for aesthetics and scalable fame is there, but not for solving a problem (even if that problem is to communicate or create some sort of functionality).

I’m sure I could make some cool looking comps for apartment building structures, but I wouldn’t recommend you sleep on the top floor.

posted at 06:47 pm on November 29, 2007 by Andy Stratton

70 Eloquently Said

Great article and great timing. I was having a discussion with a colleague about this very subject when I stumbled on this article the next day.

As far as working within constraints, we do that all the time with every type of design. We can’t usually change the size of a print piece, or the limitations of the press. We have to work within those confines. It’s the same on the Web, but when we try to map those confines directly over, it doesn’t work. For example, adding one page to a 12 page, saddle-stitched brochure isn’t physically possible. But adding one page to a 12 page Web site is easy. As designers, we have to exploit the advantages of every medium rather than focusing on its limitations.

posted at 10:28 pm on November 29, 2007 by Marvin Forte