Feb
20
Further to my previous post I find that the checklist represents a little too long a list and am not sure that any site would be able to say no to every single one of these items. Nor am I sure they would want to. Bottomline is that there is no one formula for good design of any kind including web. The people that break the rules are often the very best.I have gone through many web design efforts and am always surprised at what designs test well in A/B phases. I am even more surprised how difficult it is to find a good designer. Some of the biggest mistakes made are that people (including me) convince themselves that they can do what is a very, very difficult job. Yet design can absolutely make or break the overall experience for users.
That said, the list is a very good starting point. And definitely offers some very sound advice. In particular, having a central focus for users on each page. I also laughed an awful lot at some of the sites on the top-10 bad list. Soooooooo bad! I wonder if any of them still don’t know they are on the list or if they take any sense of pride in it? I could see people I know actually taking great pride in being on this list. Sick webbies!
In terms of what I found from this particular exercise is that I need to be able to get a better understanding of PHP in order to make the tweaks that I want in a finished design/ user experience. I do love working in a CMS and Word Press in particular makes it so easy to build a page that looks and acts as you want it to. Being able to visualize what you want and then bring it into being so quickly is wonderful. But getting it to 75% and 95%+ of what you storyboard, represents a significant difference. And that demands being able to tweak code, which is doable, but very time consuming and not something I personally enjoy all that much. In particular, ofr this project I found it difficult to try and add a second or third column to a templated one column Word Press theme. I think I found the right place to make that change and the right code to put into that place, but I can’t get it to work exactly like I want it to. Grrrr! Developer! Somebody bring me a developer! Stat!
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That said, the list is a very good starting point.
That is, in fact, the point of the elearning toolkit….
😉