Web Design Principles

There are a lot of bad websites out there on the world wide web. I thought it was going to be difficult to decide which website to write about until I stumbled across Liberty Van.

This website butchers web design principles on so many levels, however I will limit this post to my top five observations using the article 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design. These include spacing, typography, consistency, usability, and navigation.

1.     Spacing – The first thing that caught my eye was the absolute lack of white space. This page is just line after line of text crammed together with pictures. There is not enough spacing between lines and in many cases lines of text overlap.  There is also a complete lack of padding.  Lines of text run over on top of pictures in several spots.  By doing this there is no logical flow to the page.  My eyes could not find a place to land and follow a path that made me want to stay on the page and use it.

2.     Typography – Coming from a television background this aspect of web design is always very important to me.  As a producer, I was responsible to creating consistent easy to ready graphics.  I counted at least five different fonts.  There are at least 5 different colored fonts.  The blue text was very difficult to read in places because it is placed on a blue background. Also the line lengths are too long and the font styles, especially on small fonts were very difficult to read.

3.     Consistency – Or in this website’s case, a total lack of consistency.  Most noticeably is the choice of many different font styles, sizes and colors.  I think it is ok to uses different colors to highlight or group similar thoughts or threads, but this website doesn’t do that at all.  Most notably are the posted dates.  Some are red, others blue, while even more are black.  Pick a color and stay with it.

4.     Usability – Some sense of organization would help this website with usability.  It almost appears like when a thought or event popped into the designers head they just added a new line to webpage.  I think this page is dedicated to showing off two vehicles that go out into the world to spread the word about the constitution and liberty.  There also seems to be a heavy emphasis on pictures of the vehicles, but they are not organized in a way that is very usable.

5.     Navigation – This sight could really benefit from some simple navigation elements.  A top line menu with subjects of news, photos, events, and about us would make this so much easier to navigate.  Also the use of some simple radio buttons would help greatly.  One button that comes to mind immediately is a Photo gallery button.  Instead there are hyperlinks throughout the page that say click here for photos, but they get lost in the ocean of text.

I want to like this website, but I can’t. I just don’t know where to start and even if I picked a starting point there is no logical flow that makes me want to stay on the page for any length of time to learn more about the Liberty and Freedom Vans.