What was I thinking?

I don’t know if it’s proper to discuss personal design flaws, especially when a potential client could end up reading this. Plus, this site has only been live now for only two days, so maybe it’s too early to be calling out design flaws.

When I started designing this site, I pretty much opened a blank file in Photoshop and just started playing around. Not only did I not start with site map or sketches, or other preliminary work–I also didn’t think through what was going to be on my site aside from the news and portfolio sections on the front door. Now I’m faced with a dilemma.

My comments section for blog entries appear to the left of the article. This may not seem so bad to some of you, but I can assure you it is, and here’s why. The [American] human eye is trained to read from left to right, and a good designer keeps this in mind when designing a website. What I did is bad because obviously I’d want you to read the article before the comments. It would have made more sense to place the comment section below the article, or even to the right. It would have made the UI experience so much better.

Understand that I didn’t put the comments there intentionally to blatantly disregard the UI experience. You’re right, I physically coded it to be there, and this is why it’s important to completely think out a web site and the best layout that’s suitable for it. Had I known I was going to be creating a blog, I might have gone with a different layout so that the comments wouldn’t be where they are now.

Also, know that I don’t hate how it looks being on the left–I actually think it looks kind of cool. But how something looks design-wise and how it functions are two totally different things.

I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to move the comments. I’m not trying to be arrogant when I say I kind of like how it looks there. Lack of time plays a big role and as I said in the very beginning–it’s only been live for two days now. Who knows, I may be completely wrong about all this and people might really like it (all three of you).

Responses

Derek Davis
May 15, 2007, 05:05 PM
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Dan,

It is a bit awkward in placement but overall, I kind of like it. First time on the site, so it may take some getting used to, but everything looks good to me.

If you do definitely change it, I think I would put it on the right instead of the bottom, like you said.

..Make that four! :)

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This journal entry was posted on May 2, 2007 at 05:42 AM. It is filed under Design. There are 1 comments. View the archives. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

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