Ask the Box

09 jul 06

What's the criteria to having a *att perfect site?

i don't care.

that's not true -- you've made me curious as to what that means. what hath god wrought?

OH. you meant "matt perfect", as in "a site that is perfect according to my specifications". that's the only possibility i can think of, anyway. i appreciate your sensitivity to my fickle desires for anonymity, but at this point i don't give a sh*t. the consequences of alternating between caring and not caring that one's good name is being slandered about the 'net is that one's good name gets slandered about the 'net. so, i really may as well give up at this point.

i think as long as one doesn't blog that one has axe-murdered a family of eight, a somewhat odd or unconventional web presence doesn't have any negative bearing on hiring or getting an job interview (which is, of course, the only thing that matters in life, and is the thing around which we must construct all other activities). being "weird" doesn't have anything to do with job performance, so i feel no need tip-toe around making sure my values (or lack thereof) don't clash with some hiring manager's. besides, do i really want to work for someone whose personal morality gets in the way of work efficiency?

i was racking my brain for some web standard called *att, as in "an *att-compliant site". i googled for it, and looked it up on wikipedia. googling produces, of course, AT&T (phone company) related sites, as well as some swedish sites ("att" means "to" in swedish). i even asked a computer-oriented friend, who didn't know. i know this is all fascinating to you.

what do i look for in a good website? information. i don't care much about design, as long as it helps me get good info from the site. i "care about the design" inasmuch as that design makes the site easy to read and use. sometimes i look specifically for design sites, or odd arty sites, in which cases the design is the content. but glitz and glitter fluttering about my eyes when i'm trying to read an article is annoying. that said, it's nice to "have your cake and eat it to", and get well-presented content along with an attractive design that makes accessing that content easier and more pleasant.

my tune changes a little bit when i'm designing a site. then, i pay a lot more attention to the design, but i think my design is largley information-based. ie, elements exist to make the site more usable, as opposed to cuter, prettier, etc. it's hard to seperate usability, information, and design. for instance, over-crowding with images, buttons, bits of text, and ads is an example of ugliness reflecting unusability, or unusability reflecting ugliness. in this case, they're the same thing. i find that often the best design, the "prettiest" design, is the one that makes the site the most accessible.

there are a few simple elements upon which i rely when designing a site: 1) tables. 2) single-pixel lines. 3) the verdana font. 4) colors that match colors in an embedded image. 5) the "div" html tag in conjunction with the css "left" and "top" properties. although they're now most often used to format, tables were originally intended to be used as tables (oddly enough).

that was stupid.

in summary: for a perfect .att site compliance standard to manifest, a website has to provide good information, it has to be easy to get this information, and the design has to be subtly nice-looking so as to unconsciously lubricate the information retrieval. in short, design, content and usability should merge seamlessly into a "good site" -- one should not be distinguishable from another.

this is an incredibly borning page. sorry. it's late, and i want to get these done. some unscrupulous person has hit me with something like five questions in an hour, and i know exactly who he is. i have to think of something to do to him.