The Focus of Modern Website Design

The Focus of Modern Website Design: A look at BBC News' poorly designed update and why it isn't alone.

Countless major websites are 'updating' for the worse.

Perhaps it is the product of the ongoing dispute between web developers and web designers. Developers spurn designers because 'they cant code properly' and designers mock developers for their 'lack of natural instinct and ability to lay out a website in a coherent manner'.

While it's obvious that skill in both areas is a necessity, even if one side of knowledge is slightly weaker than the other; are developers now hugely outnumbering designers? It seems that many major websites today are trading in their beautifully designed space, simplicity and ease of use for large haphazard splashes of information and giving prominence to, albeit nifty, less important fancy features, scripts and web tools.


Chaotic and Cluttered

The most recent example I can think of is the most popular news source online; the BBC News website. They recently updated from a rather old fashioned yet orderly layout into what can only be described as a chaotic and cluttered onslaught of Web 2.0.
Thousands of people have responded to the changes on their editors' blog and, without wanting to delve into quotations, the mass majority having been unflattering.

A well designed website layout needs to give prominence to important information and navigation. This must be immediate. A user needs to see how to use the website and how to get what they want from it immediately otherwise they glaze over and go elsewhere. Whilst it is not the only offender, it's a focus of discussion recently so I'd like to take the example of the BBC News website further.


Inexcusable

Upon entering the website the user is presented with 4 different typeface sizes and weights. Boxes and clusters of text have absolutely no cohesion, random spaces are left between paragraphs and blocks of information. This sort of spacing error is inexcusable for a large, public funded company like the BBC:




Bad Navigation Practice

An extremely important navigational tool is placed far down the page where a user has to scroll around to find and use it, the tool is also bigger than any news story or piece of content on the entire website. Here is a to scale comparison of the largest news article to the right of this enormous navigational tool:



The tool is also unnecessarily complicated to use, and once a user has finally located the area of the site they are looking for, it is often impossible for the user to return to the previous page without using the back button on their browser. This may seem insignificant but it is very bad practice to lose the navigation tool on a page that it directed a user toward.

Inexperienced Monkeys

There were even JPG artifacts in several of the structural images until the BBC News 'design' team noticed and replaced them.
But the most glaringly obvious hint that this website layout could surely only have been designed by inexperienced monkeys is the most fundamentally important towards keeping your website orderly and clean. The alignment of straight edges:



I've used guides to highlight every instance at the top of the BBC News front page where there is a straight edge or blocks of text. Guides are an extremely basic tool used by designers when creating web layouts.
The number of guides is not an issue, this always depends on amount of content. However the spacing and layout of the guides is extremely important to make sure your website doesn't appear cluttered. In other words, each individual guide should have a consistent and systematic amount of space before the next guide. Why does this example allow clusters of items to remain unaligned and yet extremely close to eachother? Because it is poorly designed.


Not a Tirade Against Web Developers

I'm aware that this article probably seems angled towards claiming that Web Developers are to blame for their inability to design, thus fueling the fire I made reference to in my opening paragraph. This isn't the case at all, design and development are both as equally important. Whats the use of a well designed site that doesn't do anything other than display text and images right? This is obviously not a tirade against web developers, but more a look at the possibility of the future of websites and website design.

If unique design is going to become a novelty for the arts world and the business world continues its persuit down the path it seems to be taking these days; aren't we going to end up with a stagnant and ugly world wide web?