style vs function
So this morning as I’m sipping my coffee, reading over my favorite blogs, I check in on a site that I love that’s full of designer portfolios. Most of them are web designers. So many are enviable, they’re at the front of the trends…really they’re setting the trends. It’s inspirational and, as you can imagine – brings a few tinges of inadequacy. Reminds of this funny shirt I saw, but of course didn’t bookmark. It basically says the point of being a graphic artist is to make all the other graphic artists jealous. We must have gigantic egos.
Anyway, as I’m perusing (drooling over) these portfolio sites, I start to realize a few things.
Most weren’t very user friendly
There’s a big trend in design to have a one page portfolio. I really don’t get this, I want people to be able really get to know us and our work through our website, and how could I do that if you only had one page of information to look through?
The ones that did have multiple pages, the navigation was hidden somewhere in the design…either in a font that’s way too small, way up in the top right corner of the page or worked into the design in a way that I didn’t really know I could or was supposed to click if I did happen to see it.
Almost none were search engine friendly
There was minimal text on the pages, and with only having a one page site, google doesn’t like that so much. The more content you have, the more there is to log. Obviously, within reason – and a blog does help this – but just having one page with maybe 500 words total for your entire site is search engine suicide.
Style and function are two different things
I truly believe that you can have both, but function has to win if there’s a time when you have to choose. Who cares if your site looks like an amazing piece of art if A) nobody can find it and B) if they do happen to stumble on it, they have no idea where the heck they’re supposed to go? It’s a mystery to me.
At the end of the day…
It’s really an interesting emotion to look at something and envy the look, but then try to use it, or look at it like google would and realize there’s a major miss. All style, no substance. Hopefully we’ve married the two with quirky bird, because that was definitely the idea.
