An aspiring artist using code as another medium for creation. I am currently a software developer in an EdTech company focused on improving communication in the workplace. I work heavily in Ruby!
Wow thats an incredible amount of useful information! Thank you Vuild for your response. I feel like I've been tied up on the "visually pleasing" part a little too much and would likely have gone down to overdoing it at the expense of usability.
I think with this information, I feel more confident publishing something. I often get too hung up on what it looks like or the lack of fancy elements.
You are welcome. I hope it is useful. Do it this way:
Produce interesting content first.
Write nice HTML (accessible/document structure/headers etc).
Write simple, vanilla looking CSS & make everything simple/nice/basic. Try to leave as much default as possible. Think mobile.
Get some traffic to it.
Change the colors (links/section bgs etc) substantially & see if it has any impact. Most things don't. Measure your conversion goal or time on site. Do things to push this up (usually that is more interesting content, not pretty design).
Avoid feature bloat & familiarity bias (being used to a UI makes it feel simpler).
80% of traffic usually goes to a small number of areas but most people put their energy into the homepage. FB/twit/Goog/Medium/yt do not give the highest priority to the home, they put the focus on the detail & listing pages (content). When you spend a month making a stunning homepage but your blog post gets hot on HN & your page view ave is 1.1ppv, nobody sees the home anyway.
People mostly click links in content, not boilerplate. They look at a handful of pages. You need a website with 1M pages. The visual arts should be the content mostly.
Common sense is the best way to look at things. How I explain it (and why most expert UI info is not true):
Do you know what the frame of the Mona Lisa looks like?
Imagine it had flashing lights & moving things on it.
Sometimes it is appropriate (animation sites, design agencies, movies, production) but a lot is people justifying their jobs/ideas/bias.
I put my site live, some of the best (really) in various disciplines have seen it & haven't finished the homepage (look at it). Doing it live forces you to accept/get on with things.
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Wow thats an incredible amount of useful information! Thank you Vuild for your response. I feel like I've been tied up on the "visually pleasing" part a little too much and would likely have gone down to overdoing it at the expense of usability.
I think with this information, I feel more confident publishing something. I often get too hung up on what it looks like or the lack of fancy elements.
You are welcome. I hope it is useful. Do it this way:
80% of traffic usually goes to a small number of areas but most people put their energy into the homepage. FB/twit/Goog/Medium/yt do not give the highest priority to the home, they put the focus on the detail & listing pages (content). When you spend a month making a stunning homepage but your blog post gets hot on HN & your page view ave is 1.1ppv, nobody sees the home anyway.
People mostly click links in content, not boilerplate. They look at a handful of pages. You need a website with 1M pages. The visual arts should be the content mostly.
Common sense is the best way to look at things. How I explain it (and why most expert UI info is not true):
Do you know what the frame of the Mona Lisa looks like?
Imagine it had flashing lights & moving things on it.
Sometimes it is appropriate (animation sites, design agencies, movies, production) but a lot is people justifying their jobs/ideas/bias.
I put my site live, some of the best (really) in various disciplines have seen it & haven't finished the homepage (look at it). Doing it live forces you to accept/get on with things.