While in Seattle, I made the truly regrettable mistake of jokingly referring to my friend TC’s website as “that ugly site of yours.”
To say that TC was not happy about that would be a deplorable understatement. After huffing and puffing with outrage for a few minutes, he incredulously asked me to show him a site I thought wasn’t ugly. In an attempt to cater to TC’s bare-bones design aesthetic, I showed him the lovely and simple Dooce.com. Well, Tim uses Linux and Mozilla, and Dooce doesn’t look so hot on Mozilla, so all that succeeded in doing was making TC mock my taste. When I tried to explain that Mozilla was eating Dooce alive, TC got even more worked up.
“My site is designed to look clean and act completely functional on absolutely ANY COMPUTER with ANY OS AND BROWSER,” he nearly hollered.
You can see why I spent the rest of the weekend trying to change the subject whenever the issue came up. Which was often, because my beloved TC would not let it die. There are some people you just don’t want to argue with, and a pissed off scientist who’s a little touchy about his web design is definitely one of them.
It did, however, bring up an interesting thought: what’s more important to me: functionality or appearance? Plain functionality clearly doesn’t quite do it for me. Wil Wheaton has a perfectly functional website, but I would still classify it as, well, ugly. Then there are sites like this one that are very pretty, but almost completely useless. Where’s the balance? I don’t know.
But I do know that I will never make the mistake of describing TC’s website (even jokingly!) as “ugly.” It’s functional and useful. End of story.
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8 Responses to “Mistakes”
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Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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heather
December 8th, 2002 at 4:04 pm
I haven’t tried Dooce in Linux, but it looks great on Mozilla for both PC and Mac. Actually, Dooce is readable on Netscape for Solaris 9.
I gave up years ago catering to people who won’t update their browsers. I make my sites fairly simple and function, but that’s because I like that kind of design.
jonah
December 8th, 2002 at 5:23 pm
Like most things, the initial impression (good design) will get you to stay and look around, but good content is the only thing that keeps you coming back.
leblanc
December 8th, 2002 at 8:59 pm
some people are seriously senstive about their websites, i’ve learned, and they can and will blow up about offhand comments. this includes myself of course.
Imperfectionist
December 9th, 2002 at 6:37 am
I wouldn’t jokingly say Tim’s site is ugly. I would announce it as-a-matter-of-factly. Sorry, Tim. There are sites that are beautiful and functional, right? google.com is one such.
Anita Rowland
December 9th, 2002 at 11:03 am
I like the meshed graphic between the left nav frame and the content frame.
alt text on the graphics could be a bit more useful.
the look is plain, but useful.
a stylesheet could dress it up without damaging the view just by setting some fonts.
at least there aren’t any background graphic textures making the text hard to read!
kim
December 10th, 2002 at 8:54 pm
i totally prefer functional, as you can tell from my mostly-text-only former personal page.. hehehe
dj blurb
December 10th, 2002 at 9:38 pm
Unfortunately, those without an aesthetic sense have the sites that work on Netscape 1.0.
Tim shouldn’t be saying ANYBODY’S site is ugly. Using nerd tendencies in an argument doesn’t make one an aesthete.
Ariel
December 10th, 2002 at 10:13 pm
He didn’t say Dooce’s site was ugly, just that if the fonts didn’t look write on Mozilla, then it was clearly inferior to his cross-platform site. But not ugly, per say.