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"It's a byproduct of a one-size-fits-all-content design for a CMS that all of their output looks like the same drivel." I think this is a really important point, and want to further expand on it. The New York Times was cited as having a bad website. However, on occasion, when they put their mind to it, they produce a truly beautiful page with some fantastic visualization or something. But it's a one-off; you can't produce a beautiful page for every story, so you get the lowest-common-denominator page for most stories. A literal paper magazine is a concrete artifact, and a set of designers can be tasked with making each page perfect. A web page on these sites is dynamic and may literally not serve the same page twice. If, as a designer, you don't internalize the idea that these are two extraordinarily different domains, despite the superficial visual similarities of the final product, then you're going to have a hard time accurately diagnosing the core problem. And I do believe many designers make this error on one level or another, when I see these complaints. In Matthew Butterick's defense, I do think he did implicitly make one very concrete suggestion for how those sites can improve, though, at least in terms of design: Get rid of the ads. It's hard, probably to the point of impossible, to create a coherent design for a website when you are selling to the highest bidder the right to put a bright yellow and orange banner with a poorly-photographed item described in a random non-anti-aliased font unaligned with anything else on your page in the viewer's highest-priority visual space, and a different such thing for each page load. Against an uphill battle like that, is it really any wonder that the web designers of the world have collectively given up? |