As most of you know (I’m assuming people who visit this are usually friends of mine) I work as a self-employed web designer. I have a regular gig with Alderac Entertainment Group to design and maintain all of their sites, and occasionally get other work, especially through my buddy Walter’s company 2 design.
I like what I do, and I think I’m pretty good at it. My strength certainly isn’t in the actual graphic design — that’d be Walter’s forte. It’s also not in coding database backends. I’d call myself “pretty good” at these two things, but I think where I really excel is in web useability.
I make sites that are good to look at and easy to navigate. The URLs are “smart” enough so that you can probably guess the URL to type in and it will work. Looking for L5R fiction? Try http://www.l5r.com/fiction/ How about the Spycraft RPG product listing? http://www.spycraftrpg.com/products.html
So when I’m out browsing, professional sites that are built solely for their “cool factor” annoy the hell out of me. I’m a big proponent of Macromedia Flash. I love its file-sizes, and the power it conveys. However, I see Flash as an alternative graphic format to JPG and GIF, not as a way to create entire sites.
Ok, what started this little rant? I was checking Penny Arcade’s new post today and saw a link to http://www.naughtydog.com/ — the site for the new video game Jak II.
Graphically, the site is gorgeous.
But try to figure out what the fuck you’re supposed to click, and you’re spending far too much time hunting for links. Web sites for games shouldn’t become games themselves, people! The web is about easy dissmemination of information! It’s about conveying what you think is cool about your product (in this case, a video game) to your fans, not about annoying the hell out of them so much that they close the window in a fit of disgust rather than decipher your ridiculous navigation scheme.
And that’s what I did. I didn’t even think about it conciously at the time. I wasn’t getting web-design-snooty about it. I just gave up and closed the site.
And afterwards, I realized what I’d done, and why, so I came here to rant. Will it do any good?
Probably not. But it feels good to get it out there anyway. Gah. It’s late, I don’t even know if I’m coherent… G’night.
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