Two Sites

I’m a big believer in what I call ‘practical design’. And to give new clients an idea of what I mean by this, I will often mention two web sites. The first is Amazon.com (which is considered by many to be the gold-standard of practical web site design.) If you were to take a look at Amazon.com about once a month you’d see that it is always changing in a very slow way; kind of like how people change as they grow. I don’t mean the products. I mean the look and feel. It is always being polished, but not in a random or arbitrary way. Those guys are constantly looking at visitor data and making subtle tweaks to the site based on that study. And Amazon does this with one goal in mind: to sell more stuff.

My point is simple: Amazon’s interest is not in ‘design’ for design’s sake. Yes, they want Amazon to look great (and it does), but if it looks great that’s because it works well and not the other way around.

Now go look at Craigslist; another very popular site that works very well and is very popular. Most people wouldn’t want a site that looks like Craigslist, but the point is that it is exactly what it needs to be.