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David Ogilvy once remarked:

A good advertisement is one which sells the product without drawing attention to itself.

I think he would agree that the same thing goes for a web site. If you look at a web site and say, “Wow, what a great web site!” you have a completely different experience than looking at a web site and saying, “Wow, what a great product [or service]!”

Unfortunately, the world of web site design and development is ruled by those who want to create beautiful sites to further their own careers, and not to further the economic fortunes of the products and services featured on those web sites. If you don’t think that’s true, just take a casual stroll down any set of industry-related web sites, and you’ll see a great deal of similar afflictions (and affectations):

* Web sites whose copy is completely devoid of sense or validity–rather than copy that addresses the reader’s problems
* Web sites full of tilt-a-whirl goo-gahs and PT Barnum freak show effects–rather than design that leads the reader to clarity
* Web sites with total innovation as its goal–rather than the comfort of the known and useful

Of course, get six of us “experts” in the room and you’ll get three or four different takes on all this, but really, web site development has taken a wrong road. Instead of being the medium through which a message is conveyed, it has become the point we all talk about. It’s as though the only reason to go to art galleries is to discuss the kinds of paint used by the masters; or, the only reason to purchase books is not for the reading, but for the pleasure of collecting typefaces or paper grades. And oh, by the way, isn’t it cool how this particular publisher puts the spine on the left instead of the right, so you have to read in the opposite direction? And look, the pages are randomly numbered! How cool.

Not.

Things have gotten better, I suppose, or at least they did until the Web 2.0 thing started happening. I’m not against the democratization of content, per se, but I do find some of the design patterns a bit troubling. One of the neato features of Web 2.0 is the lightbox effect (or modal dialog), in which the picture or item you’re looking at floats above the page. You see this a lot with Flickr and other services.

Why is this so bad? Well, it isn’t bad, so much as annoying. Here I am working with the most open-ended content delivery and linking system in the universe as we know it (ze Web) and now you’re forcing me to look at just one thing at a time (but reminding me that the other stuff is out of reach by placing it in the blacked-out background). Irks me to no end that I have to consciously finish what I’m doing to go back to all the other things I also must do. It’s a throwback to the pre-Windows era when machines only had enough memory to allow one task at a time.

Seriously, if I wanted that, I’d dig through my storage boxes, find my ancient (but very reliable) Atari 130XE (the one with 2! disk drives and 128 honkin’ KB of RAM) and load up AtariWriter to pen this blog. I could then write without having the old Mail.app ping me with incoming mail….hmmmm…maybe this would be better!

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