Have blogs changed our idea of what constitutes a well-designed webpage?
I was reading Wired’s interesting piece on guerrilla webpage redesign, where disgruntled folk take the content of a badly designed website and make their own mirror, throwing out the Javascript, cookies, confusing menus, bugs, excessive art-junk for a slimmed down, simplified imitation on their own server.
While the piece talks about the trouble these folk go to, and the trouble they land up in, I couldn’t help noticing that David Jone’s excellent makeover of Wales’ National Assembly website is basically a blog. Everything is there from the original, but it’s all a lot easier to navigate and much easier on the eye. But it looks, feels, and walks, like a blog.
Are blogs turning the huge ship that is the World Wide Web back to its roots, where webpages were less about glitz and more about content, where simplicity and usability counted for more than multimedia interactivity and gee-whiz mouseovers? Or not? Or did it all happen a long time ago and I only just notice?
“Are blogs turning the huge ship that is the World Wide Web back to its roots, where webpages were less about glitz and more about content.”
I think & hope you’re right. If you look at the leading ‘blog-thinkers’ on the net, they’re all about this. Bottom line is – People return again and again for the content not the bells and whistles.
I think that people who love blogs are morons. I know, you’re thinking I’m just flaming, but hear me out.
Everybody is connecting blogs with “content”. WHAT CONTENT?? Who gives a crap about these people, if they’re blogging about nonsense and can’t spell passed a grade-five level??
Content?! Ugh. Blogging is part of a far larger movement in our society, a movement I call “Bowel Movement”. Society is getting stupider and lazier. We’ve become too stupid and too lazy to create pages with intelligence and planning.
Instead we get someone else to do it because we’re stupid and lazy. So we rip off someone else’s blog interface (because we’re too stupid and lazy to create our own… called a “webpage”, duh) and then we rip off content from someone else (because we’re too stupid and lazy to actually formulate our _own_ opinions and need the validation from others).
Wow! The Future of Web Design is here! Let me get a knife and stab my head.