Design vs Art Blog

White (or blank) spaces are a good thing, at least in web design. As the web becomes more and more faster designers and programmers tend to place more features. At the end of the 90s we saw colors, pictures and sound in an excessive way. Unfortunately many  web designers didn’t learn the lesson: sometimes, maybe usually, more is less.

Too much information and features are going to make a website difficult to use and to understand, affecting the whole site usability in a negative way. Users may feel themselves lost and silly, and they might leave forever.

This problem is starting to be seen at Amazon.com. There, the user is bombarded with a huge amount of information, images and interactive features. Just imagine for one minute that your a new customer at Amazon and you find yourself at this website:

Another example is the Musician’s Friend website. Leaving almost no blank space gives the feel that using this site will be a headache.

A good example

Flickr leaves a lot of blank spaces between elements, typography is big and homepage is not overloaded with information. Flickr is a powerful website that gives users a feel of simplicity. Notice the difference?

Popularity: unranked [?]

Wordpress is a greet blog tool that I have been using for some time. The new version 2.5 has some improvements, specially on design.

1. Default color. By default the old Wordpress interface used to come with a horrible strong blue. The new one comes with a web2.0 pastel palette. This is something that our eyes can be happy about.

2. Wording. If a feature or button is not labeled properly users are going to have a hard time finding it or discovering what this feature is for. An example is the "Presentation" tab on the old wordpress administration that was hiding the design-related features of the blog. I remember having some trouble to find this features the first time I used Wordpress. Now the tab is called "Design". Great!

3. Organization. A good little move to improve usability was to reorganize the menu. Write, Manage, Design and Comments are on the left, the rest was move to another corner. This puts the important stuff together and makes the administration page look simpler.

Popularity: unranked [?]