newly ancient

Bad design is like turning your site into a stereotypical teenage boy’s room with “No Entry” signs and Led Zeppelin posters all over it. Bad design will drive visitors who want to see your content away because they can’t find it or it is too hard to use. Good design is like furnishing a nice house in calm, neutral colors. Good design will welcome visitors into a site and help them to find the content they want - even providing a foot stool in some cases. Great design is like building a beautiful site and laying welcome mats for 20 miles around it. Great design will grab a visitor’s attention, wrap them up in a blanket, and supply them with limitless amounts of hot chocolate. When you have a great design, visitors who might have no interest in your content will stay a while just to feast their eyes (or in some cases, ears). It’s like when you have a party with great food - people will stay even if you are a total jerk.

Take, for example, StartCooking.com. I have absolutely no interest in cooking. I almost didn’t get on high honors because of FCS - another name for torture induced by cooking and endless poorly produced videos. Take me, the macaroni & cheese geek, clicking through the new additions to 9rules and finding StartCooking.com. Instead of immediately leaving due to the topic, I was grabbed by the great design - the colors, simplicity, and general coolness. The design drove me to click around a bit, see all the awesome JavaScript action, and finally watch one of the videos. Surprise, surprise! I actually understood it. The design, production, and simplicity of StartCooking.com eventually drove me to subscribe. *gasp* Who knows, I might actually cook something besides eggs or macaroni & cheese sometime. Great design is where you grab visitors who don’t care about your content and convince them it is worth reading/seeing. On your next website, remember to lay out the welcome mat of a good design.