Are most commercial websites designed by children?
What is “cool”? From my hourly observation of website design, it’s anything that puts undue emphasis on visual appearance and technical trickery to the detriment of accessibility and usability. “Cool” designs are the ones produced by the clueless designers that, two weeks ago, I somewhat generously called “decorators with keyboards”. Contrary to one misreading of that little diatribe, I have nothing against websites looking good. I want them to look as good as possible. However, when functionality and usability are sacrificed for appearance, the result is bad web design, even if the same thing would “look good” in a book. Indeed, the root of the problem is the idea that a web design is just print design with add-on multimedia and dynamic effects. For a working example of how “cool” design can be dysfunctional, try Matthew Somerville’s “usable” version of the Odeon website before looking at the original (See links above, from NTK.net). Also try changing the size of the browser window an
