Sure, You CAN, but Should You?

Promise me this much: When I die, please don’t hold my memorial in the Staples Center?

Let’s talk a little about perspective and what is appropriate, and all the while, let’s dance around the issue of good taste.

You can do all kinds of things with a Web page. You can use seventeen fonts, or more, on a single page. You can use thirty colors for type and background and so on. You can have nine vertical columns, or you can have only one.

You can make all of the mistakes in Web Pages That Suck, either the book or the Web site (or both). Or you can learn from the mistakes of others.

You can argue that you prefer a single column, 24” across, of 9pt text. But deep inside, in your heart of hearts, you have to know that most people would rather have that horizontal space broken up into more manageable column sizes. That’s why we have columns in our newspapers and even in our magazines—and in our better Web pages, too.

Maybe you love Blue. You enjoy light blue text against a dark blue background, with varying shades of blue in the page headers and image borders and so on. Monochromatic sites have their place, but it may not be the way to go if you are trying to reach, and keep, a wide audience. In their way, staying entirely within a single color family can be as awful as dealing with dozens of colors in a busy, frantic page.

I can do things when I build a Web site for a band that I would never do if I was working on a page for, say, an attorney. Grunge fonts, dark shadowy images, Flash treatment of various links providing scary rollover effects? Is that what you want when you are looking for some entertainment on a Saturday night? Or is that what you look for when your dog gets loose and bites the neighbor kid and you have to go to court? Likewise, do you want solid, conservative, gravitas-laden images, graphics and design when you are deciding what band to go and see? Is there a band anywhere that tours in Grey Flannel? The early Beatles were the last band I remember performing in suits, and even those were collarless.

Even once you have settled on major themes there are still a great many other design properties that need to be settled dealing with the purpose of a page. Are you trying to provide reference material online? Are you trying to build an online brochure? You need to use a whole different toolbox if you are just presenting information than you would use if you were trying to convince someone of something, or trying to showcase what features and benefits accrue to satisfied customers of your work.

Special menu effects are interesting and fun when they don’t get in the way, but they aren’t going to help boost your traffic if your page explains how to do something. If I land on your page from a Google search because I want to lean how to set my computer to automatically wake up and go to sleep at different times every day, I’m not going to probably ever come back just to marvel at the way your navigation grows, shrinks and evolves. Money, time and other resources spent building glamorous navigation is going to be lost on that kind of a page, where again, if the page was more of a brochure, that kind of thing might be much more appropriate.

If you are building pages for a retirement community, are eight- and nine-point text sizes the best you can choose? Sure, a user should be able to adjust their browser or their computer to compensate for whatever shortcomings a designer may have left them, but older people are most likely to have problem seeing smaller text, and least likely to know how to make changes.

You have a lot of power, when you sit down to build a Web page. With great power comes great responsibility. Be sure you use it wisely.