Altered Prose at Pif’s Corner

Somewhere there has got to be a great universal formula that can precisely indicate how much creativity a web page can take before your visitors go from Oh wow to Ah shucks. I will attempt to begin that journey now, here, in full naked view knowing that few will agree with my presumptions and fleeting conclusions. I expect, however, that there are a few of us out there who agree that this is a journey necessary to take. We are, after all, geeks in a professional body suit.

Rules and Regs

First, some ground rules. I’m not trying to tell you what to do. I’m not even trying to convince you of anything. I am, though, attempting to breach some sort of understanding between when and why creativity is sehr important, and when accessibility (useability, standardability, whatever) rises supreme. I suspect at this point in my thinking that both needs (the needs of aw pretty and the needs of yup, that’s what I want to click on) can be satisfied simply through understanding.

The Skeleton in the Closet

Disclaimer: I love standards. I love predicable rules with predictable results. I come from a background of development, not design. My experience with Photoshop and the Gimp is taking the designer comp and rendering out the best approximation of html and css code. I’m much more comfortable using Textpad than Dreamweaver. I’m trying to use more standards; take a look at my front page and you can see that I’m following standards as best as I can.

I create web pages for a software/hardware manufacturer who sells to businesses and consumers. But these customers tend to be pretty cool folks; after all they work anywhere from Hollywood to WCVB and all the nooks in between. They tend to gather at our community, in case you’re interested.

Why Design?

I think it’s important to understand why we use design. Sure, this seems common sense, but I suspect many of us lose sight as to why we’re trying to leverage design as a tool to reach an end.

• Entice – we want to interest and entice the visitors to follow some course of action (watch to learn from a video or flash piece, read to make a decision of an action – clicking a link most likely)
• Focus – we want to somehow control where the visitors will focus, or at least the order in which they will focus. Some folk look fast and then either do an action or leave, some other folk will take a few more seconds to look for a bit and then follow a course
• Comfort – we want to immediately let the visitors feel comfortable with the web page, through consistent brand elements, recognizable design features, etc.

I’m sure there is more to the basis of design than what I’m mentioning, but as I stated earlier this is a start. I expect to evolve my own thinking as I articulate.

Why Standards?

Allowing as many visitors as possible in your intended audience to hear your message allows for more people to take the desired course of action. For some pages this could directly relate to revenue. After all, if only 80% of the people going to a page and intending to give you money for a product can actually complete the online order, then technically you’re losing 20% revenue! An extreme example, of course, but ask any sales guy what percentage of sales they would be comfortable with throwing into the trash.

• Access – It’s math. The more people who can hear your message increases the amount of people who take the action you desire.
• Browser support – I can’t think of any browser that isn’t trying to follow standards. Sure, not all browsers have the same degree of standards compliance, but they attempt to follow as best as they can. Simple reason is that people want to be able to go to any site of their choosing with the browser of their choice and do whatever it is they do on those sites. If their browser doesn’t work on 25% of the sites (random number) then they very well might start using a different browser.
• SEO – ah, the old search engine optimization excuse. It’s probably the one element in designing for accessibility that most people don’t understand – myself included. Sure, it makes sense that if you put all the important bits of the web page as high up into the file as possible, and you keep repeating the same keywords in the text then search engines will rank your page higher than if you didn’t. But no one has yet been able to clearly state to what degree of importance each seo tactic is for the rankings, since no search engine will give out it’s formula. The best method I have found to leverage decent seo is to presume that your web page is being read text-only. Strip out as much code as possible and make it so that the visitor can read the text uninterrupted from html bits and chances are not only are you close to Section 508 compliance (government standards) but you are also at the very least not hurting your search rankings.

So now what?

Well, now I’m going to stop here and let this sink in for a bit. The next step would be to start applying some real virtual world examples and to look for commonalities. Trends. I should probably define more the elements of each contender (what makes up design and the appearance of creativity, and what makes up slick, easy to use and read code). I’m purposely going to avoid javascript from this discussion, as javascript has evolved into more than just a developers tool; AJAX and js libraries are being used more and more to solve, or even extend, design complexities. But that’s another blog post of it’s own.

As always, thanks for your time. Remember, never code alone.