All of our staff have been to University and are Educated to Degree standard in all aspects of Computer Programming. This means we have all been formally taught how to design web pages.

Anyone can create a Web page with a text editor or Web Authoring tools such as FrontPage.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of individuals and even companies that will charge you a lot of money for a Web Site, who clearly have no concept of Web Design.

A Good Design is the key to your Web Site and it is obvious to people visiting the pages whether the Author is simply showing off or if they have the visitor in the forefront of their mind when writing their code.

As Simple As Possible

To quote Albert Einstein - Things should be made as simple as possible -- but no simpler.

The virtues of simplicity are well-known among experienced systems designers.

• Simpler is easier to use.
• Simpler is more stable, and less prone to error.
• Simpler is more compatible.
• Simpler is easier to maintain.

Easier to Use

Psychology has a substantial literature confirming something everybody already knew anyway: simpler tasks are easier to master. By implication, simpler Web pages and simpler site designs are easier to master, too, especially for Internet Newcomers.

Indeed, it's likely that relatively inexperienced Web users make up a sizeable portion of most Web site's readership. The sustained growth of the World Wide Web means that there is always a constant influx of new users.

Roughly one in every 15 or so of a site's readers has been browsing the Web for less than a month.

By implication, many readers are still in the process of learning to master their browser software. So, intricate, complex pages and elaborate navigational hierarchies are likely to overwhelm these less experienced readers.

Then too, everyone who isn't a regular visitor to your site is "new," in the sense that they are unfamiliar with its content, organization, and structure. By inference, simpler interfaces make for more inviting Webspace, regardless of how long a given reader has been browsing the Web.

More Stable

One key to building stable, robust systems is to minimize the points of failure. Intricate, multi-layered site structures are, by their very nature, easier to "break." And sites that present multiple intra-site cobwebs can't help but frustrate even the most patient of readers.

Readers will soon move on to simpler, less elaborately-structured Web sites.

Web Browsers are subject to Lubarsky's Law: There is always one more bug. The more elaborate a Web page is, the more likely it is to encounter that one place within the browser that causes a client-side error.

More Compatible

Of course, Web clients are notoriously buggy creatures, with more than just a single bug. Thus it's not surprising that even relatively simple designs can prove incompatible with various browsers. It's surprisingly easy to create a syntactically valid page whose contents is incompatible with, or even invisible to, one or more Web clients.

As browser versions multiply, it's becoming increasingly difficult to "work around" all the various and sundry browser bugs. The day is probably not far off when sidestepping a bug in one browser will actually end up triggering a bug in another. Thus, Web authors who are concerned with the accessibility of their content will naturally gravitate to simpler designs, simply to ensure the broadest possible readership.

Easier to Maintain

A recent foray onto the WWW yielded a site that bragged:

This site has been optimised for 10 different browsers, and has been rebuilt from scratch 4 times in the last six months.

An astute reader might just be tempted to think that these two items are related to each other! A simpler, more broadly compatible approach that avoided a dozen different "optimisations" would allow the site designers to devote their time to creating new content, instead of rebuilding their site every time a new browser beta is released.

Your Point Was?

In summary, complex pages and elaborate sites are harder to use, less stable and more error-prone, less broadly compatible, and harder to maintain. So the inescapable question becomes:

What exactly is the perceived value in complex, elaborate Web pages and intricately designed sites?

Indeed, even the word elaborate comes from a Latin verb that means "to acquire through labour." In other words, an "elaborate" design implies that readers have work at exploring your site and its contents. But one key to creating reader-friendly Web sites is to decrease, not increase, your readers' workload.

In the early days of the Web, the user population was probably more technically-minded and thus perhaps slightly more tolerant of the foibles of the emerging technology. But as the size of the Web's reader population increases, readers are becoming increasingly impatient with and less tolerant of "elaborate," error-prone, overloaded designs.

It is probably impossible for designers to underestimate reader intolerance. Simpler, faster, easier designs cannot help but appeal to a much broader readership.