#19 (week 8)

Interestingly enough, I think this illustrated to me some of the major differences between what someone who needs internets sites vs someone who wants sites look for...

I checked out about a dozen award winners in several categories, and was struck with how little I liked the majority of them. Actually, that is why I checked so many out (the last half dozen or so I really just dipped into, homepage plus a few other pages only) - because the first ones I went to I thought were pretty awful. It's taken a while, but I felt I had to know if it was just one or two, or if I was really so out of touch with what apparently rates as top of the line for most people - or at least for the judges for these awards.

All the sites I looked at seemed to be visually cramped &/or crowded, excessively stuffed with rather unnecessary visual pollution or items which were good only for slowing down page access, like pictures, data-dense wallpaper, huge blocks of complex images... And quite a few of them were into noise pollution as well. The award site itself was a prime example of the sort of stuff I don't appreciate. Takes up to 30 seconds to load, and when I just now went back into it to see if the download speed had improved since an hour ago when I first looked, it took 45 seconds. That's just the first, main page. It would probably time out if I were on the dial up at home. And yes, lots of people do still have dial up - or what Telecom mis-names as broadband.

Which is not to say that the functionality of some was not attractive, where I was sufficiently motivated to wait around for pages to load. Which wasn't often. And I even visit some of them occasionally (biblio.com quite often, realtravel.com & reddit.com sometimes) so know what they do etc.

I guess the thing is, I use the internet to access information on behalf of others for large chunks of my day - and those others are paying for the service that I provide - or the services I access for them, most available via the internet. So I don't want bells and whistles, pretty pictures that tell me nothing and slow things down - I want clean, clear pages with quick navigation, access to a site map and effective site-search box, and the option of printing pages quickly and cleanly where required. Medal winners don't offer these (for my work) basics, in the main, if this site is any indication.

I think an ideal world would have a websites etc of all kinds with a kind of toggle mechanism - click here for the 'just the information' display, and click here for 'bells, whistles, fru-fru etc' display.

*That* would make for more happy campers...