Over-Complexity

Some designers delight in making things more complicated than they need to be, even when that complexity inconveniences the user - as though the very technicality of the site is some kind of personal award to the site designer!

There really is NO NEED to design a simple site with complex coding. Indeed, many seemingly complex tasks can be done amazingly simply.

I am not talking about workarounds and make-do here, though there certainly is a place for that when it is all that can be done. No, I am talking about using the simplest form of coding, and the fastest, least intensive choices that will do the job efficiently.

I have seen a simple site, that was only updated about twice a year, with nothing more than articles and links to them, which was coded in ASP. Each page took four to five minutes to download on dial-up. The resulting page had nothing but a header, a sidebar navigation, and a story. There were no dynamic features on the site at all. Nothing that required high level programming. Yet the designer had created the site with dynamic code which took 10 times as long to download as it would have if simple static pages had been used.

I have seen other sites that used far more complex coding than what they needed, which caused unnecessary delays (slowing down the page by many times over what the alternatives would have done), and which instead of enhancing the function of the site, merely made it inconvenient and frustrating.

The rule on this ought to be to use the fastest, most efficient coding possible. That each page should be made as convenient as possible for the user, and NEVER just a means of displaying the advanced skills of a designer!

Advanced skills are nothing to brag about if, in obtaining them, the coder has forsaken their common sense.

Written by Laura Wheeler