Feed Sign in with OpenID OpenID

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Independent Days on Daring Fireball

Daring Fireball: Independent Days. A sprawling essay that covers web design principles, corporate vs. independent sites, Mac punditry and the justification for adding Google Ads to a weblog. Well worth a read. I particularly liked this quote, although it was more of a side-point than a key point of the article:

Less markup. Less scripting. Fewer navigation elements. Fewer colors. Fewer graphics. Omit needless words. This is how you make a good web site. I know this for a fact.

Such design goals, however worthy, are notoriously difficult to sell to clients. A good web site costs a lot of money, and for a lot of money, most clients want a lot of web site. Lots of scripts. Lots of graphics. Lots of needless words.

Posted 9th July 2003 at 11:12 am

This is Independent Days on Daring Fireball by Simon Willison, posted on 9th July 2003.

View blog reactions

Next: Marketing for Geeks

Previous: Throwing your money around

3 comments

  1. There's much to be said for simplicity. Not always: something like the CSS Zen Garden is great - but then that is just HTML and CSS. But what people are really looking for (most of the time) is content; and if you haven't got it, presentation is no substitute.

    I'm reminded of Orwell on language. Pretentious websites are an equivalent to what Orwell calls "pretentious diction".

    I'm on dial-up, and if a site takes too long to download, I just don't bother with it.

    michael - 9th July 2003 14:08 - #

  2. Man, that really rings true. I've a meeting with a client on Friday about a redesign for their existing website. The last meeting I had with them, they were asking for lots of fonts and lots of animation. They showed me other websites in the same market that had nothing more than a Flash movie that was basically a 30 second advert.

    They haven't cottoned on to the fact that the web is a different media, and I'm not a teacher. The service we provide is pretty damn cheap, as we are just starting up. You can see it in their eyes when you start to explain why they shouldn't overdo it that they think that you cannot do it, which is fairly frustrating.

    One of their main complaints was that their "latest news" section was out of date (Christmas 2002 offers). They pay us a retainer every month to cover content updates - all they have had to do is email us with something new to put in there, and the job would be done. They haven't cottoned on that you need to provide good content yet.

    Argh. </vent>. Sorry :)

    Jim - 9th July 2003 14:51 - #

  3. I love his writing style, but I would have liked this better if it was broken up in different entries. I was getting tired of reading one long entry that jumped from different topic. It kind of made it lose its cohesiveness and effectiveness. After reading it I wasn't sure what I was supposed to get out of it, which is unfortunate because each section was well worth the read. Again it's awesome that someone with such a large following harks on simplicity in design.

    Paul Scrivens - 9th July 2003 17:55 - #

Comments are closed.

Previously hosted at http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2003/07/09/independentDays

A django site