The last time I redesigned this site I had a lot of ideas that had been gathering in my head, on little notepads, and in e-mails that all went into the design with no real focus on a set of design goals. And it showed.
The text sizes were strange, the graphics were heavy and took a long time to load, and the design just looked sloppy and unprofessional. I spent most of my time tinkering with the Prototype and Scriptaculous Javascript libraries, refining the page load animation, debugging the AJAX-powered live search, and ignoring obvious usability issues. Only a month or two after I had released it, I was totally sick of that design.
This time around I had a solid set of design goals in mind and made a mental note to stick with them no matter what fancy crap I wanted to try. My design goals were:
- 1. Clean
- The design should flow over the entire page. Whitespace should be used in place of borders and separators when possible.
- 2. Lightweight
- No Javascript libraries. Libraries are way too large for what little utility I get out of them for this small site. Minimal graphics. It is usually easy to ignore the handful of users with slow internet connections, but mom is still on a modem! Javascript to enhance user experience only. Enough with the useless Javascript animations, they are slow and annoying.
- 3. Scalable text
- Computer users are getting older (hell, I’m getting older!) and vision degrades with age but there is no reason that readability has to decrease.
- 4. Scalable layout
- If the text scales, it would be useful for users with large monitors to scale the window size as well.
- 5. Encourage discussion
- Making commenting controls more accessible and showing off users’ comments will surely encourage more feedback and discussion.
And that’s it! Very simple set of goals but I have to admit, it was tough sticking to the plan. I came very close to adding huge photo viewer in the header inspired by Schiller’s site and I almost wrote Javascript to make the header graphic bounce when the user hovers over it inspired by Mac OS X. Then there was Matt Mullenweg’s redesigned blog and I was recently introduced to the incredibly well designed sites of Jeff Croft and Jonathan Snook. Lots of clever, inspiring ideas on those sites, but luckily I was almost done when I came across them.
My original plan was to release this as a WordPress theme called ‘Edgy’ and post it at themes.wordpress.net, but unfortunately I doubt I’ll have the time to generalize it and package it up.
So, in the spirit of design goal #5, let me know what you think.