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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Websites Have Two Layers

To keep this post focused and sim­ple I will assume that web­sites have two lay­ers:
design (UI/presentation) and code (technology/mark-up). Which layer is most
impor­tant in build­ing a suc­ces­ful web­site? Both you will say. But in the end
the web is about inter­ac­tion. Jason
Fried at 37signals on the topic:

“There’s way too much talk about CSS and XHTML and Stan­dards and
Acces­si­bil­ity and not enough talk about peo­ple. CSS and Stan­dards Com­pli­ant
Code are just tools — you have to know what to build with these tools.”

Peo­ple, peo­ple, peo­ple! Web design is a bit like a car —
the engine (tech­nol­ogy) and every­thing else that makes using it bear­able (inter­face).
Over at the won­der­fully designed Airbag, thoughts
of Greg Storey fol­low a sim­i­lar pattern:

“Now I’m all for a good con­ver­sa­tion and exhi­bi­tion of great design work
but enough is enough. Web stan­dards and style sheets are here to stay (ya hooray!).
It’s time to move on. So let’s talk about money and metrics.”

So? Is the fuzz about XHTML, CSS and other new excit­ing tech­nolo­gies over?
Can we move on? If you buy a car you assume its engine will func­tion. Nowa­days
there are no shame­lessly bad engine man­u­fac­tur­ers left. What really dif­fer­en­ti­ates
brands such as Ford, BMW and Volk­swa­gen is the expe­ri­ence they sell. The auto­mo­bile
indus­try is a mature indus­try. The web is not — yet. Look around. Do we
see stan­dard com­pli­ant code every­where? Can we assume web­sites have solid mark-up?

Per­son­ally I agree with both Jason and Greg. Yet I think they’re look­ing
in the wrong places. The blo­gos­phere tends to talk about code. Yadi yada val­i­da­tion
yada yadi stan­dards yada yada. We are part of a small group that cares and knows
about good mark-up. But there’s more hap­pen­ing around us. SxSW
is not solely a user expe­ri­ence con­fer­ence, nor is it purely a design event.
SxSW just hap­pens to attract a lot of peo­ple talk­ing about CSS. Leave the coders
do the talk­ing about what they know best: clean mark-up. They should not stop
inno­vat­ing or spread­ing the word — on the contrary.

If I want to dis­cuss all things user expe­ri­ence I post a mes­sage to CHI-WEB,
check the lat­est news at Infor­ma­tion
Design and have a good laugh with the folks from OK/Cancel.
Oh, and maybe even read what Jakob Nielsen
has to say. It’s not a mat­ter of “or”, it’s a mat­ter
of “and”. We need both. I focus on design, not code — it’s
what I do and talk about. If you want to change the indus­try put your money
where your mouth is, but don’t tell peo­ple to stop doing what they love.

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

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8 comments on “Websites Have Two Layers”

  1. Posted by Andy Budd on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Couldn’t agree more.

  2. Posted by DarkBlue on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Any web­site has to serve its tar­get audi­ence — that is so obvi­ous it barely needs to be written.

    If the pur­pose of a web­site is to sell prod­uct, then the prin­ci­ple area of any impor­tance is the user expe­ri­ence (Can I find the prod­uct I want? Can I found the ancil­liary infor­ma­tion I need? Can I com­plete the pur­chase easily?)

    If the pur­pose is to sell a design agency then the prin­ci­ple focus should be on the visual expe­ri­ence (I’m not got to con­tract a designer who has an ugly website).

    Cor­po­rate web­sites should be about infor­ma­tion: share­holder reports, office loca­tions (with all the nec­es­sary con­tact details), product/service infor­ma­tion, doc­u­ment archives, etc.

    For a per­sonal “home page” there are no rules (waits for the flames).

    But, I can’t think of a sin­gle type of web­site that should NOT strive for acces­si­bil­ity and standards-compliance. Yet, today, only a small per­cent­age of sites fol­low the rules. So, IMO, the web­sites that dis­cuss CSS/XHTML/etc are not only appre­ci­ated by me per­son­ally, they are a necessity.

    Web-designers the world over need these so that they can adjust their prac­tices and trans­pose the old web with the new.

    So I can only agree, we need to work hard on both lay­ers (design and code) with about equal impor­tance assigned to each.

  3. Posted by Didier Hilhorst on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    Acces­si­bil­ity and stan­dard com­pli­ant code are a neces­sity. It is a given part of the equa­tion. To express my thoughts in math­e­mat­i­cal terms:

    f(x) = ax + b

    Where f(x) is your web­site, a = design, x = the vari­ables you include to shape user expe­ri­ence and b = (good) code. The small b is con­stant and should always be present. If not your equa­tion will yield some­thing dif­fer­ent — some­thing less good in my opinion.

    I like to focus on ax. Because it’s what I love. But that does not mean I don’t have respect for the peo­ple that talk about the b. It’s all a mat­ter of bal­ance I guess.

  4. Posted by Arikawa on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    There’s a bit of “preach­ing to the choir” tone to Greg’s com­ments on Airbag, and I can’t say that I dis­agree with him. Some­times its a droll task to visit your favorites/check your feeds and find more of the same CSS/XHTML talk going on. But I think that may be due to the ever-changing mood of the cre­ative rather than the rel­e­vancy of the topic.

    It’s easy for us “in the know” (sounds elit­ist, but its not my inten­tion) to think that CSS/XHTML has been talked to death — because we’ve all fol­lowed it for so long.

    But the fact is, not every­one is at “our” level yet. A new begin­ner is born every day. Hav­ing these resources freely and openly avail­able to every­one is ben­e­fi­cial for the com­mu­nity as a whole — even if it’s all “old-hat” for some.

    That said, I agree that there should be more dis­course about user expe­ri­ence. Even amongst our­selves, if we have roughly the same % of good markup, its our design and user expe­ri­ence that set us apart.

  5. Posted by Mike P. on Thursday, March 18th, 2004.

    I agree with Arikawa, and feel that some more vari­ety would be inter­est­ing. So, <red­faced> a quick check of my blog and all I see is css, stan­dards and seman­tics! </redfaced>

    One thing I find though, and maybe it’s lately, there’s too much empha­sis on the ‘valid css/xhtml’ end and not enough on basic seman­tics → and I mean the kind you can read right from the specs.

    Great com­ment Andy.

  6. Posted by Adam on Sunday, March 21st, 2004.

    Great post and com­ment Didier, I love your metaphor of a math­e­mat­i­cal rela­tion­ship. It shows the power of design rel­a­tive to cod­ing, and the all-important “X factor”!

    Andy you’re right about much stan­dards talk being akin to preach­ing to the con­verted. On the web as in print, a good writer is one who elu­ci­dates that which is felt by many. I reckon there’s been an under­cur­rent of dis­con­tent with standards-obsession amongst many design­ers, and thank god there’s some relief com­ing now.

    I was start­ing to think web design was all CSS cod­ing there for a while!

  7. Posted by Scrivs on Monday, March 22nd, 2004.

    Damn, never would have writ­ten today’s post if I saw this. Oh well. Bet­ter to attack em from all angles.

  8. Posted by web on Wednesday, April 7th, 2004.

    I can see how peo­ple can become sick of hear­ing the same old rhetoric, but still aren’t “99.5% of web­sites obso­lete??” The good fight needs to still be waged, against tag soup, sloppy html and non-semantic code.

    Although XHTML + CSS should never be a replace­ment for good usabil­ity design. Nor should it be imple­mented in order to increase prof­its … isn’t that what spam is for?