Week 11: Spring

I had a nice spring break last week, returning to my roots as a recreational BASIC programmer and not thinking very much about professionally valuable languages like HTML. Now that I'm back, it's time for more website reviews!

The sad thing about lists of useful websites from 2008 is that some of them have dropped off the Internet here in 2011. My eye was drawn immediately to the CSSFights.com website, which looked from the thumbnail graphic like an engaging way to compare and evaluate web designs. But the site no longer exists as such. It's been replaced by a mere gallery of designs that the webmaster presumably thinks are cool, indistinguishable from most of the other sites we've looked at this semester.

Speaking of indistinguishable websites, how about the other twenty-six of this week's readings, huh? Look, let's be honest. Five or ten websites that showcase really good web design make a valuable and useful list. Forty or fifty is just redundant, especially when they often link to each other in a big backpatting circle. Yes, there is lots of interesting web design out there. Some of it is fun and artistic in spite of being completely dysfunctional, like iamyuna.com, which I found through CSSBased.com. Some of it is practical and unexceptionally brilliant in its thoroughly best-practices integration of form and function, like volusion.co.uk, which I found through CSSHeaven.com. But there are only so many sites you can look at before you feel like you're not going to see anything new, and more to the point, only so many compendia of "good design" you can look at before your eyes start bleeding at the samey samey sameness. It's not that I think I know everything. I know I don't. But what I don't know is no longer the kind of stuff I can pick up just by looking at websites and thinking about them real hard. Here are some things I don't know.

1. I don't know how to implement most of the designs I consider good. I know enough CSS to put together a workmanlike site that will neither confuse or annoy my audience, nor win any awards for innovation. But I don't know how to do the snazzy stuff that injects art into otherwise by-the-book websites. I barely know how to do mouseover effects. The scrolling banner graphic and pop-out content boxes on volusion.co.uk? No idea where to begin. Can't learn just by looking.

2. On a related note, I don't know how to write original scripts. I'm proud of being able to make someone else's PHP work on my website, but I can't write PHP (or Flash, or Java, or other mainstays of the Web 2.0 "look"). Can't learn that just by looking at websites, either.

3. I don't have great artistic vision. I look at my current website and I think, "well, the font's ugly, the banner needs work, the background is bland." Those are things I sort of know how to do something about, and I will do something about each of them before I turn in the site, but the result will still obviously be a set of boxes stacked on top of one another. About the limit of my creativity is feeling that I ought to find a way to make some kind of graphic that overlaps my content column into the background area, and I don't even know how to do that. But I can't learn artistic vision just by looking. That's like thinking you can watch a hundred New York Yankees games and know how to hit home runs yourself at the end of it.

So, sadly, I don't have much to say about this week's websites. They didn't do anything for me, in the sense of teaching me to be a better designer. I could rattle off some criticism of random designs I found through the sites, but my heart wouldn't be in it, since I can't do a tenth of what the worst designer featured on those sites can do. True, you don't have to be a vintner to know good wine from bad, or to say "this wine is bad and here is why." But I'm not trying to become a web design critic, I'm trying to become a web designer, and I've reached the limit of where criticism can take me.