I’ve been surfing some of the weblogs I subscribe to, poking through their blogrolls for gems I may have missed. I’m amazed at how some weblog designs are so overly complex that it can take me a minute or two of scanning a page just to find the “subscribe” link. One site I looked at had a grand total of 469 hyperlinks on the main page alone. Many were blogroll items, bookmark links etc. But they overwhelm the reader with so much superfluous data that it’s difficult to find the simple single link you’re looking for…
And no, I’m not going to single out any particular weblog. There were many (many) that I came across today, and usually they were complex as a result of the default templates provided by whatever weblog software was in play.
I know I’m often as guilty of this as the next guy, but I’ve made a conscious effort to trim extra crap from my weblog. Sure, there’s still some extra fluff in there, but it should still be pretty darned easy to find something on it…
I just did a hyperlink count on the main page of this weblog – 144 hyperlinks. Much more than I thought, but they should at least be organized well enough to not get in the way…
There endeth the rant.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I totally agree with this rant!!
I think ‘clutter’ is a problem with not just blogs, but most web site designs in general (such as one for a university I am quite familiar with). I think web designers need to learn the concept of use-cases and start thinking of “reasons people come to this web site”, and tailor the design to meet those cases with efficiency. I personally translate this into what I term a ‘wizard’ or ‘deep’ style layout. *Physically* a site is a ‘web’ of links, but *logically*, according to use-case, it can be thought of as a ‘tree’ structure. With a ’shallow’ layout, the front page of your site (the root of the tree) has a link to almost every other page on the site. A ‘deep’ layout presents a minimal (reasonable acording to use-case, over-reduction can be just as evil) set of options at the root (and each sub-level), walking the user deeper into the site tree to find what they want (wizard style). There can be multiple logical paths to any one physical page (leaf), organized by use-case. Each branch of the tree should NOT link to the other branches – it should only present options to navigate up or down within the current use-case, that is to say, your university ‘application for admission’ page does not need a link to the ’swimming pool hours’ page (admitedly extreme example). Put another way, Headers, Footers, and Menus need to be context sensitive. Web designs that optimize for the number of clicks are missing the point, sure, you have to click less times with a shallow layout, but if the options are intelligently designed in a deep layout, finding *what* to click on should be so obvious as to be almost subconsciously fast – rather than forcing you to spend a minute finding the right link on each page.
Exactly, Chris. I’m guessing most people visiting any website aren’t too concerned with how many clicks they have to make. They are more likely to be more concerned about their ability to find what they’re looking for. That can/should have nothing to do with the number of clicks – and be more related to organization, searchability, and stuff like that.
I actually wasn’t too concerned about other people’s experience with this website – it is primarily intended to be an offline brain for myself (and I use it all the time). As such, it has to be easy for me to find stuff. A decent (doesn’t have to be perfect, or great) design lets me do that. Without wading through blogrolls, last 500 posts, other sites I visit, blah blah blah. That stuff is still here, but it’s tucked out of the way. And there are other tools provided to give better control to the user (i.e., me) in accessing content. If other folks find it useful, that’s a bonus, too