May 16, 2006
It's the content, he thought. The content.
Things are looking a little different around here. The poorly designed site of old has been replaced by, well... by a wholly new poorly designed site. Huzzah! I hear you cheering. Good, because I did for you. All for you, gentle reader. Not all those other people who come traipsing by the site. No, for you. Because you are my absolute favorite.Um. Wait a second. I can feel your look. Don't sit there staring at me with a cocked eyebrow like I gave you a washing machine for Mother's Day. Give me a minute to explain.
The old blue hypocritical (which I can bring back at a moment's notice thanks to the magic of templates) was a placeholder design. A placeholder designed in the halcyon days of early 2001. Well, not halcyon in the traditional sense. Halcyon in the all-of-my-stock-options-are-in-the-toilet-and-I'm-having-a- hard-time-reconciling- my-twenty-hour-days- that-were-going-to-pay-off- and-even-though-it-was-fun- I've-no-idea-why-I-allowed-myself- to-get-all-wrapped-up-in-this-irrational- exuberance-fun sense.
I designed that template (and I use the term "design" loosely) to be a container for content. Now, in 2001, we weren't exactly embracing AJAX or really even getting down and dirty with CSS on a regular basis. So the template was very static. Accessible? No. Controllable? Yes. Lots of td and tr tags going there, if you get my drift, and I know you do. Hunh? Hunh?
Worst of all? It was wicked hard to read. Gray on blue? This seemed an incredibly inane thing for someone who claims to be "focused on design" to do. Hindsight, my friend. We all learn from our mistakes.
So, I began to reapproach the design. I began to rethink it. Despite all my ripping on Web 2.0 design, I started sketching out gradients and big type and horizontal stripe backgrounds. "The blog is called 'hypocritical'," I told myself. "You can do anything you want. In fact, you're a genius for coming up with that name. Brilliant. It's carte blanche to second guess yourself." And then I droned on and on for another few hours telling myself how cool I was.
But, then the marketing side of my brain kicked into high gear. Market research. I need market research. From my target market, even, maybe.
So, I laid my heart out to the masses. I even asked you for feedback. And did you respond? Indeed you did to the tune of a resounding, chart-shattering zero comments. That's zero with 9 zeros behind it.
Which said one thing to me: the only people who could actually see the site were those who were reading the posts in feed readers.
Oh RSS feeds and your deliciously undesigned goodness. Allowing readers to access the content they wanted without the chrome and widgets and... hey hey hey. Hold up. Wait one second here. I might have stepped in something here. And it smells awfully sweet.
You see, people tend to read this site for the content. Not for the design. So making the content as accessible as possible should be the primary focus.
And I tried. The design worm kept twisting, despite the fact that I didn't really have the skillset to satisfy it. But I kept trying. So I had to make some things a little gray or a little big or whatever. But my true goal was providing something that was more legible (like the fact that you can actually resize the text now because the sizing isn't hard coded) and accessible and all of that.
So that was the impetus behind the de-design. More lack of design. But now, it's more accessible lack of design. And, just think, now you can actually read it.
We'll just have to wait and see how that actually affects the subscriber base.
It's the content, he thought. The content.
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