Designing cloudless.net

(April 13, 2000) After a year of building, maintaining, and expanding cloudless.net, I've learned to follow the following design principles:

Content is King

Instead of putting useless links to other people's homepages, I try to create some real and original content. My articles are very personal; they might not be interesting to every visitor from the web. But that's what personal homepages are for, right? I do have a clear audience though !V my friends, my family, and myself. Actually, a wanderer might get lost! I don't even introduce myself.

Simplicity

Clean, uncluttered. No Java tricks, no animated gifs, no background music, not even a single background picture. I am not a good artist, I just want my messages to be delivered as I expected. It is a failure if the design distracts the audience from my content.

Usability

Intuitive user interface - instantly understandable without the need to learn. No one is patient but myself. If I don!|t make it easy, people will go away after a few clicks.

Readability

Text must be easy to read. I pick comfortable background colors, double-spaced paragraphs and clear fonts, to make the text easy on the readers' eyes. Because this site is heavily text-based, it is necessary to make it suitable for prolonged reading.

Consistency

Every page looks and feels and works in the same way. Getting accustomed to a new site is difficult enough, let alone different areas of a site. I only use 3 fonts and 3 colors throughout the site.

Scalability

Expand any part of the site without requiring a major redesign. I've divided the site into different areas, with each area containing several sections. The page layout is flexible enough to allow frequent modification.

Compatibility

Optimized for MSIE4, usable under most browsers. I've even tested it under the WebTV browser. No Java or plug-ins required, just plain HTML4. It took me some effort to make it look good under different screen resolutions too.

Accessibility

Since it is pure HTML, it can be navigated without a mouse. Keyboard-only navigation is allowed, WebTV users can take advantage of their remote control; blind people can use voice commands. It should work fine under a speech engine too, although I haven't tested it yet. Users take control, change font size as you prefer, turn off all images if your connection is slow. I keep my site accessible and adaptable.

Interactivity

This is the most difficult part. The Web is supposed to be a communication tool, but so far my site is primarily a one-way street. A personal home page is usually very self-oriented, so is mine. I want some readers' input; I want to know what they think. If I want feedback from a stranger, I need to write some very interesting articles. To actually start a discussion, I need to hit the critical mass.