why are my web sites so messy?

A web page I have recently written for dyd.co.nz to explain why my web sites tend to be a bit messy:


Good question! I look at other web sites, even those similar to mine, and think - they are so tidy and ordered. In fact it is a standard these days to make a web site (or a blog site which is often similar) as appealing as possible with regard to structure, ease of navigation around the site, understanding what the site is all about. The expectation that web sites will be "tidy" is now so entrenched in "web lore" that most people coming across a messy site will probably say to themselves "what is this?" and go away again rather than make any effort to explore the site.

In some ways this is a pity, because the World Wide Web is not tidy - in fact it is a big big mess. It is made tidy by the layers of software that we usually use to access it; but if we access the web in its "raw" form then it is quite a different matter. And yet, by trusting our access to these software overlays we are potentially missing out on a large part of the richness of the internet.

 There clearly needs to be a balance here. We don't want to explore the web only in ways dictated by software, that has often been written not only to make access look tidy but to direct us to particular places on the web. Yet we also don't want to have to work out how to search the web from "scratch" each time we want to find something (and of course most people would have no idea how to access the web without using the software overlays, browsers etc.).

One form of software overlay will help users produce "nice looking" web sites. This software will certainly help produce a site that meets current web site "standards", but it usually comes with an efficiency cost; that is it will take more time and effort to produce the site, using this software, than just putting material on the site directly. I would rather put my time (which is limited) into putting content onto the web, rather than making it all look pretty.

The human mind is not a pretty place. The human mind is more like the "raw" world wide web. This is why we can have such interesting conversations with people, make amazing connections between ideas and thoughts in our minds and build concepts that have fuzzy boundaries.

So, my choice is to put effort into putting content onto the web - not making it look nice and possibly easier to retrieve - and to have a web site that is more like a human mind than a structured history book. I believe that this will make it a more useful site in the long run, particularly as software designed to extract data from the internet, in all sorts of forms, gets more sophisticated.



Denys yeo

upi:dyd-dgyeo

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