It seems good design is now back to being simple

After seeing website design examples and applying concepts in class and after reading chapters written by Robin Williams and John Tollet, I guess I began thinking about good and bad design every time I entered a website. As very reader-friendly and helpful the chapters were, I would like to emphasize one aspect of design I think is most important today: simplicity.

I believe that web users of the 21st century are more familiar with different functions and gadgets of a website than ever. They are pretty aware of what they might have to do next in order to retrieve the information that they want. I think that is why well-made websites these days tend to have portal – sort of like a huge door around a castle wall – for their websites; and the thing is, they have to simple to catch the eyes of the visitors.

News websites, since they have to carry a lot of information from the very start, do not seem to put simplicity first. However, I think as people become more and more familiar with the web environment, the news website will try to evolve into a simpler one. One great example I think is a website called www.mediastorm.com. This is a website of compilation of different video/photo/slideshow projects, and their website is very simple: A menubar at the top that repeats itself throughout and just five or six photos that are representative photos of projects. The black background and photos, although they do not show much of a contrast, works rather fine because it does not eat up the whole page from side to side. One more thing I like about this website is that it does not require people to scroll down for more information. I think as people now know that they have to click on a menu to find something that they want, this user-unfriendly but simple website can be the answer for a very well designed website for the contemporary world, not to mention the future. I just hope that I can pull something like this off to satisfy the needs of many web surfers out there, but still being able to give them a notion that my website holds a lot of information.