Essentee Blog
Web design and management articles, guides and even the occasional rant.
Are current web design trends pushing us back to 1999?
So asked Louis Lazaris in his article published on Six Revisions.
Louis gave a bit away about his age when opening his article with a reference to 1991 when Nirvana broke onto the music scene. And I don't 100% agree that at the time Rock was pretty much dead.; I liked the glam metal bands - they were fun.
His point was, not long after Nirvana bought something truly different to the masses, hundreds of imitators were spawned which just led to a different flavour of more-of-the-same derivative music.
So, what was the point of this and can we get back to Web Design
The point was that some of the trends being touted today are leading to pointless unusable websites just like some of the trends of the 90's did and we should be wary of simply following trends without asking the question why.
Louis uses examples of the hit counter. Remember them? I personally have never put one on a website I had anything to do with - who cares how many visitors you've had and who trusted them anyway?
It is the number of tweets/likes and followers that are the modern day equivalent. As we all know, often what is popular is the completely inane and no recommendation of quality material or insight of any kind. I think following people just because they have tens of thousands of followers is pointless. I did that in the early days and soon learnt that often these people simply work hard at following a lot of people because a certain percentage will follow back to be polite.
Splash Pages
I thought these had died, but you do still see them. Fortunately they are not common - now we get fancy-pants CSS and Flash animations within the site itself. Take a look at many an award winning website and it might be pretty - but functional ? No.
But one of the best points in the article was the one that compared the old scrolling marquees (ack!) with today's Twitter streams. Unless they are relevant to the website or page being viewed - why are they there?
Design Form over function
The one trend that seems to never go away is the fascination with form over function. I've seen many a website owner become enamoured of flash animations or a striking show of graphical design wizardry only to find that the site is well, pretty much unusable.
I read a wonderful quote a while back "Pretty websites win awards, functional ones win customers". Sums it up.
