Tamara’s Unqualified and Unsolicited Opinions on Web Design
I have strong opinions for design of personal websites. Let’s go through them!
Readability
Give your website high contrast. This helps for accessibility reasons, and frankly it just looks better when designed well. Use black on white, or white on black. If you want a lower contrast option, you can have that, but that shouldn’t be the default. I want to be able to actually read your website.
Similarly, regarding readability:
Line length
The optimal line length for a website is 65 to 85 characters. Once you get much longer or shorter than that, it starts becoming harder to read.
This website has about 80 to 85 characters in each line, which is on the high side, but is still plenty readable. It’s less readable on a phone screen right now, I am aware of this, and will fix it when I have the chance, but on a desktop it looks good.
Size
Not counting images, each webpage is under 15 kilobytes. If you’re on a slow connection or you can’t load images for some reason, this website will still load super fast.
If you can load images, then due to using thumbnails, it will still be pretty small by default. You can click through to see larger images, but those are never loaded otherwise. This helps make the website load quick. You don’t need to wait for heaps of tracking bullshit to load in order to read the actual text, you can just… read the text.
Speaking of tracking bullshit:
Zero tracking
This website’s privacy policy is this: I don’t collect any data at all.
Simple as that.
Why would I need to? This is a personal website, for god’s sake, and unless you get in contact with me, I don’t know who you are or who’s reading this website. Frankly, I don’t want to know. There’s enough of that out there already without it permeating onto people’s own websites.
I’m not sure if Neocities (the web host) does tracking, they might, but I can say with confidence that I don’t. You can check the source of this page, there’s nothing there.
Design
Despite all of this, I think the website still looks good. You don’t need tonnes of JavaScript libraries or external font stacks to make a website look good, you just need some basic CSS declarations.
I do go a bit further, though. For example, unless it’s not appropriate, all apostrophes and quotation marks are curly, not straight. There’s no real reason not to have curly quotes any more, unless you’re showing a piece of code or some other document where the difference actually matters. For normal writing, it’s fine.
Basically, I designed my website so that it looks good even on Internet Explorer 6, and so it’s as accessible as possible in case you’re using a text-only browser. I’m not kidding by the way, one of the design goals was to ensure that this website will gracefully degrade as much as possible, while still looking as good as possible. I only assume your browser and computer supports UTF-8.
Conclusion
Well, this was a ramble that kind of went nowhere. I basically just wanted to get my opinions out there, and have a reminder to myself in case I try and break these rules in the future. No slop coding, no overly complex web stack, just basic as hell HTML.
Ooh, I like that. Basic as hell HTML…