Purveyor of Iniquities

I spent days and days working on the last redesign of dartreview.com, and ended up with a complex, confused, and befuddling layout. That was arund August, I think. Then, last week, I decided to redesign dartlog.net for the sole reason that I hadn’t in a full year. Starting from scratch, I had a new design in half an hour that was far superior to the original.

A few days later, I brought the new design to dartreview.com. It took about 2 hours.

It’s fun doing site design when it works out so easily. The problem with the last dartreview.com design was that I was trying to do too much at once; there was just too much information, and I couldn’t come up with a comprehensible and coherent way of displaying it all at once.

The solution? Don’t.

The only site that I’ve seen recently that makes good use of complex metadata is the new harpers.com, which is based on the f-train sitekit, which I would use if it were open sources (as it will be, eventually, maybe). Even on that site, however, what’s going on is not immediately obvious. I’ll bet more than half of harpers readers probably never figure it out. Once the concept clicks, though, it’s a great experience. Until then, however, I can imagine it’s very confusing.

In other words, most sites, having about-average readers, probably couldn’t get away with such a radical design. Confusing your readers is generally not a good thing.

But at least, in constrast to my old dartreview.com site, there is an intelligent schema behind it, so that it can click. And if any readership can put up with the learning curve, harpers’s probably can.