March 11, 2004 | View Comments (23) | Category: Design Critiques
Summary: The LockerGnome design critique.
First I did not ask for "permission" to critique this site and since it is not a personal site, but a company site, hopefully nobody has their objections to this. Over at photomatt there is a pretty heated debate about the actual markup of the site which Simon also hit upon earlier. Keith had another one of his great discussions on his site concerning web standards. Many of the people who argue against Matt and Keith tend to lean on the side that if the site works then there should be no problems. Okay, let us just assume that is a fair argument, it still means you gotta look at the site (Scoble, RSS, blah, blah, blah...thanks). So let us "look" at the new and improved LockerGnome and bring some discussion back to design.
The best feature about having a site you run blowup is that money making opportunities tend to present themselves more readily. I am sure LockerGnome gets a good number of visits per day so it would be advantageous to many companies to place an ad on the site. However, why let them place some annoying blinking ads that kill (yes I said kill) the whole site. Six ads are there and only one of them is not blinking or moving. People come for the content and the design is supposed to emphasize the content. The design of the ads are used to take the emphasis away from the content and place it on the ads. Nice.
Look closely at the site and all of its elements and you will see that there is very little use of padding or margin to give them separation. It almost seems as though the designer was attempting to squeeze the whole site into a PDA screen and forgot that some people still use their computer monitors to view websites. Padding and margin add whitespace, which allow elements of design to breathe and to give your reader's eyes some time to relax instead of being in a constant state of chaotic movement. It is not hard to add so a lack of it is just a poor excuse for design.
To no one's suprise one of the most powerful elements of design is color. Color allows visual separation and in the case of websites can show magnitude of importance. On LockerGnome everything is blue, therefore everything must be the same. There has to be something that the designer intended for me to click on first, yet I would not have any clue of what that is. Some sites are made from one big image, this site is one giant link.
I wanted to remain as professional as possible while I went over the information architecture of the site. I wanted to question why at the top of the site you have five distinct sections yet below that, the five sections turn into six. I wanted to get into an intellectual conversation discussing the merits of not really having a global navigation scheme at the top of the page or using the footer effectively. In the end though the only thing that came to mind was that the IA is just one giant clusterf*ck (I know I lost all credibility there).
Nope. Not going to happen. There is no way I am going to compare the merits of liquid design versus fixed design, because there is no need to. However, is there any logic in having your homepage use a fixed layout and the internal pages use a liquid layout?
To be honest I am still waiting for these guys to come out with their new design that they have under wraps because letting something like this out in public is crazy, only because the previous design was 10x nicer. If they are using it as a marketing ploy to get everyone talking about their site then fine, it worked.
The reason I care about how the site looks is because if I care about the message, then I want to see the message in its original environment. When I go to a museum I know every artist is trying to communicate a message to me and I rather him try to do it through a painting then through those summaries under the painting (RSS feeds).
When it comes to the issue of web standards I am beginning to get a little numb. I will always use CSS and never go back to tables, but I am beginning to grow tired of arguing why you should or should not use them. Greg talked about why we need to discuss the business results of using web standards to actually make them effective. I am thinking that if you are a designer or a web company and you have not caught on yet, well it will not be my fault five years down the road when I am lightyears ahead of you. Keep building your sites as if you did not know the Y2K bug exists and I will build mine knowing that the future is both today and tomorrow.
Trackback URL: http://9rules.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/174
It may be true that they're trying to generate traffic; I know I didn't visit LockerGnome until everyone started taking about this, and I went just to see what they were talking about. Regardless, it produced impressions for their ads.
Chris Vincent (http://dris.dyndns.org:8080/)
You should probably put a link to locker gnome's website in there somewhere... Unless you're trying to avoid giving them google cred? :-)
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
I couldn't agree more. When I went there a couple weeks back, I thought it was a very proffesional site, with a couple of usability concerns.
Now, I visit it today, and it looks like Flashkit (sans huge 100 pixel tall adverts) but for geeks (no harm meant). Like you said, it just looks cramped. I would venture to say that I hate it, and so much so, that no matter how good the content, I wouldnt visit again.
It just hurts my eyes...
Josh Dura (http://www.joshdura.com)
I didn't link to em because I do think they are trying to generate a buzz so why should I contribute by giving them some of my precious PageRank?
Scrivs (http://www.9rules.com/whitespace/)
The current incarnation of this site seems like a giant 404 page to me, which maybe is the look they were going 404, but it gives me the feeling that I screwed up when I entered the URL. PS: Using words like clusterf*ck gives you credibility cuz yer keepin it real. Right? OK what do I know...
An Elderly Man In A Dress (http://www.submunition.com)
I can understand why they went back to a table-based design but what I don't understand is why they didn't use CSS to style the table, text, ...
Bart N. (http://index.percept.be)
It does seem like they are doing this on purpose. The pure CSS design they were using before is an example of the fact that someone there knows what they are doing. Not only was it standards based, but it just *looked* much better from a design perspective. The colours, the information organization...
It's almost like they are afraid that good design and standards support will turn away technically minded readers. Is this the case? Do the Scobles of the world actually prefer amateurish, gawdy designs like Flashkit or Slashdot over sites that are actually well designed?
mattymcg (http://www.opinios.com)
isn't this their second redesign in recent history? the previos one was actually pretty well done. this is a huge step down.
vlad (http://vlad.nadahq.com/)
until they make another statement, descibing the (un)design job they've done, we can only speculate.
i speculate that the person who did the CSS design has parted company with them, and someone's teenage nephew has been asked to do it, on his new PC.
Because web design is really easy, right?
pid
in fact, take a look at the HTML.
Attributes are quoted, unquoted, headings aren't semantic, they're classed DIVs, there's a vague organistation to it, but doesn't make a lot of sense.
You'd have to be a)amateur, b)lucky to have found a circa 2000 design/layout lying around on a disk somewhere, or c)seriously machiavellian to put this up.
pid
I definitely believe this is a traffic-generation ploy.
Building a standards-compliant website does not happen by accident. And if you're a web designer that has taken the time to learn web standards (and they obviously have given the previous design), then building a site that looks like so much FrontPage98 flies in the face of what they know to be true.
I don't think this is a case of bad design. I think they knew exactly what they were doing.
Its a stunt and it worked because we're all talking about their site and hitting it.
But for me, that was the last time.
cm (http://telerana.f2o.org)
Hmm, maybe they will re-release their standards based design in three weeks... on April Fool's Day??
mattymcg (http://www.opinios.com)
i speculate that the person who did the CSS design has parted company with them.
The guy that did the css design (before this most recent ickyness) is one of my best friends. It wasn't so much a parting of ways as, they just up and fired him, after he had worked long and hard to come up with that design for them.
Between the blinking ads on lockergnome, and tucows taking over blogrolling, it feels like all of those guys are just selling out.
Tina
Ahh.... Nephew art... Tina, p'raps your friend should mail them his consulting rates. :-)
JC (http://thelionsweb.com/weblog)
"well it will not be my fault five years down the road when I am lightyears ahead of you."
You sound worse than a geek dressed up as a klingon at a star trek convention. Superiority complexes and authoritarianism galore... geek up!
A Q
i know this isnt the right place to ask, but when are the finalised results for the Feb re/design coming in?
Steven
So now Chris says:
Doesn't look great on anything less than 1024x768, but those folks are in the minority.
Forgive me, but isn't the reason they dropped Chance's design was because of the minority that couldn't see it perfectly?
A bit hypocritical, I believe.
Tina
Hey, don't look at my screen size, look at my browser size. See? I don't keep it full-screen. I don't like it full-screen. Don't design for full-screen.
My biggest annoyance with them has been their very poor customer relations of late. A while ago (before the last redesign) the newsletters stopped showing up. No explanation, no nothing. Then, poof, they were back - again sans explanation. If you went to Mr. Pirillo's personal blog you could find the reason, but not everyone is looking there, nor should they.
Frankly, there isn't much of interest in those newsletters anymore either.
Tim
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#1
Aside from what coding technology they use, what I find equally horifying is the fact that their layout changes radically for each major section. My god. Plenty more issues with the site and I'm just left shaking my head in confusion as to why they think that this is so much BETTER?
Alanna (http://www.expio.net)