Our illustrious leader Dave puts a good amount of effort into making pcmech.com look the way it does. A nice easy-to-recognize logo at top, a proper layout so you can easily tell where you are at any given time on the site, thumbnail images on home page articles to more easily separate one article from the other (which is totally for your benefit), and so on.
Techmeme, one of the fugliest sites on the internet, finally did a redesign and it’s a good one, so they’re officially out of the fugly department. But it was also said that Drudge Report is now "indisputably the web’s ugliest news site".
Now I will admit up front that Drudge Report is really ugly, and has a design so basic that it will still even work in Netscape 4 and IE6 easily. If you have that software available, try it for yourself; it really works.
However there is something endearing about ugly web sites. It’s generally true they load a whole lot quicker, work in just about any browser and in most instances are easier to read.
Aside from Drudge Report, I don’t think there’s really any major ugly web sites out there anymore, but you can find a whole bunch of personal ones.
Here are three examples:
useit.com - Jakob Neilsen is huge on web usability, and his site while technically ugly is one of the most easily readable, and that’s the whole point.
stallman.org – Yes, I’m talking about that Richard Stallman, as in the guy who launched the GNU Project. Extremely simple layout, no fonts defined (which on Windows ends up as Times New Roman more often than not), very fast-loading and very easy to navigate.
Daring Fireball – John Gruber’s site isn’t exactly "ugly" per sé, but rather just very minimalistic. Itty bitty fonts throughout, a dreary gray appearance, and a home page that scrolls on for miles.
Some of you upon seeing those personal sites may think, "Wow. I wish more web sites were like these, because they load so quick and are so easy to get around in."
The attractiveness of an ugly site isn’t from its look but rather its readability and ease-of-use. When you load a simple ugly site, it will work no matter what browser you’re using. IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Lynx, ELinks, whatever.. it’ll work. And that’s what makes them great.
Firefox does have an "ugly switch" if you like the ugly look
In the Firefox browser, there is the ability to turn styles off on a per-website basis. Bring up the menu by pressing ALT, then click View then Page Style and select No Style.
When I brought up a PCMech article with the styles turned off, this is how it looks:
Very simple, very basic, very ugly – but sometimes that’s exactly what some people want.
Fortunately in Firefox, you can enable/disable styles at whim for whenever you feel like seeing something simpler that’s easier to read (and print!)
Should web sites scale back on design and get a little uglier for sake of speed and readability?
Would you be in favor of this? Or is it better off just dealing with what we’re given?
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There is a genuineness to websites that are not professionally done.
David R,
In no was I making a rude comment about your site. PCMech is as genuine as it gets.
I love the minimalistic look and design of John Gruber’s site. Stallman got his right as well, funny thing is I stumbled on his site last night and low-and-behold you pointed it out today. PCMech is very well laid-out, nice job Dave.
I think you confuse minimal or plain with ugly. I wouldn’t call any of these ugly.
Want to see ugly? Look at some folks Twitter pages or MySpace. Horrible repeating backgrounds that interfere with reading the text. And overabundance of bright colors for no reason. Etc, etc.
The word you’re probably looking for is “basic” or “simple”, which would be a better descriptor but most people equate the late 1990s look of web sites with “ugly”, so I went with that.
Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, readability is in the eye of the reader. If I want to READ something, it had better be displayed well. Just as in print, it should be printed well, i.e. with proper contrast. The current breed of graphic “artists” and web designers seems to have been raised on FAST PRINT, grey on white being their favorite tool du jour. While “economical” use of black ink might be desirable in (strained) personal circumstances, it is downright idiotic onscreen, yet it has spread like the plague. To protect my eyesight, I no longer follow Reuters, Forbes, and any number of other sites incl. blogs that humor the public with bleached-out colors.
“Ugly” is neither here nor there. The best websites will be simple, robust, and informative at a glance. Drudge does not quite make the cut, for some reason (“thin” looks?). But Techmeme has it just about right, and the same goes for Stallman and Nielsen. One can tell those guys are no fools – unlike the multitude.