Getting to many of Google’s more advanced features actually requires a fair amount of expert knowledge. Since the features are not revealed on the home page, we usually have to learn what features are available, and how to use them, from an outside source. Google offers many non-search related features, like blogs, a shopping cart servie, email, and an online office suite that are not readily apparent by just visiting www.google.com. Further, many of the advanced search related features that Google offers, like using the search box as a calculator, are usually learned by reading tips elsewhere, or by digging deep into its page hierarchy. Google can get away with this because of its dominant market position. Most of us don’t get books or blogs written about out sites and how to use them. The very fact that there are multiple books written about using Google is a strong clue that its home page doesn’t give us all the information we might want.

To make our sites usable we need to make the features we offer readily apparent from the beginning. If we feature visitor contributed content, as do forums, community sites, or YouTube, we need to make it readily apparent how to play the game. Would ebay have become what is was without making it simple to sell stuff. Would Amazon have been as successful if it didn’t feature customer reviews of its products?

Even if we don’t offer user contributed content we need to make it easy for visitors to find what they need. That means making what they are most likely looking for prominent. As a consumer and tester of too many shareware programs, I’ve seen a lot of product websites. The ones that work seem to follow a simple formula. They offer an: overview page, a features page, screenshots, faqs, documentation, an order page, and a download page with system requirements clearly featured for each product. In addition they offer a contact/support page, a home page and often either support forums or more and more a wiki. On any or all of those pages they include user testimonials, links to online reviews, pull quotes, and photos of their products. The idea of providing a simpler page to start with and obvious links to more information is called progressive disclosure.

They could make it simple and leave out any or most of the above, and just say here’s my product buy it. It’s not likely they would have many sales from such an approach. The same is true of software sellers who leave out the details and say download a trial for free, then buy it. Why should I waste my valuable time playing with an under documented program when there is usually another that will do what I need that does give me adequate information to make an informed choice. It is no accident that a major element of web design is termed information architecture. The web is about information. If you don’t provide it, you become irrelevant. If your competitor provides it and you don’t you go broke.

The trick to simplicity is not to leave out features but to make it easy for visitors to find the most important information quickly and easily. The page design needs to be as complicated as it takes to achieve that goal. So simple is a relative term, not an absolute one. The best kind of simple is the kind that makes information obvious and using the site easy, not the sparest interface.

Stop for a second and consider the king of low cost merchandising, WalMart. How simple is their store layout? Did that get a laugh? A WalMart store offers an almost overwhelming display of so many products that I wouldn’t even dare guess at the number. WalMart stores are not simple, yet they are outstandingly successful.

Let’s go even further down the cost ladder and look at swap meets, flea markets and jumbles. Simple? Organized? Lovely? Not hardly. They make WalMart look like a paragon of organization in comparison. Are they successful? There sure are a lot of them.

Where do we find simplicity in retail marketing? Jewelers come immediately to mind as do boutiques and specialty stores. I think you might begin to see where I’m going with this. Compare an Apple Store with Best Buy. Both are successful enterprises but the general perception created by each is quite different. Best Buy isn’t nearly as overwhelming as WalMart but in comparison with the stark and uncluttered Apple Store it seems so. Which has the more upscale image?

In our culture there is a direct correlation in most people’s minds between simplicity and price/quality. Simply put, if you are selling discount merchandise or appealing to a market that would typically shop for discount merchandise, a simple and elegant website would be a mismatch. A Cartier look would not sell Crayolas or Cupid frescos. Nor would a site that could effectively market off brand boom boxes appeal to someone looking for an audiophile stereo.

It isn’t just about the brands you advertise but the very design elements used in the layout. As a simple rule of thumb the more down market you go the less white space your design should incorporate and the more cluttered, colorful and busy your layout should be. The more upscale, the simpler, cleaner, and monochrome you should make your design. To use loaded terms, you might consider this the snob or reverse-snob appeal of your site.

My personal bias is toward the simplest and cleanest design possible. Making a simple site that is visually appealing is a greater challenge than making one with more visual elements. Color, widgets, off site advertisements, quotes, photos, and special features and offers are actually easier to combine into a usable layout than fewer simple elements. Visitors to a busier site have lower design expectations. Those who gravitate to the beauty of simplicity don’t just want plain. They want the difficult elegance of the Zen garden. That’s not saying that busy sites can’t be beautiful but it is more the busy beauty of a Victorian parlor than the severe beauty of a Danish modern living room.

This takes us out of the realm of upscale/downscale into other psychological aspects of design. Are you promoting, elegance, romance, ideas, utility, and so on? If you are selling lavender scented soaps and candles, you are selling romance, not soap and cand.es. WalMart will sell perfectly adequate soap and table candles for a fraction of the price you can afford to charge. What makes your product different? A good part of the difference is that hand crafted products made from locally grown lavender evokes Monet paintings, vast swaths of purple in some romantic locale and a sense of treating yourself to a little luxury. And hand crafted products may not be better in any objective sense but they also evoke emotional responses.

Your market will probably cross economic lines, but it appeals to the romantic impulse, so that’s the look and feel that your site needs to convey. Romance can be busy or simple in execution but it needs to provide a sense of lushness and warmth. Vivid photographs or graphics, ornamentations, script-like text treatments, colored backgrounds all help, as does a middle ground between simple and cluttered. In this case staying in the middle ground of simplicity helps appeal to both ends of the market. You are just as likely to appeal to a teen spending her baby sitting money as the executive longing for a touch of romance and ease in an otherwise hard edged world.

So the simple concept that simple is best is not so simple. Simple as opposed to confusing is good. Simple as opposed to busy is not so straight forward a call.

Georgia’s popularity also reflects our growing ease with computers. Improvements in screen quality have made it easier to read more sophisticated fonts online, but we have also become more practiced at interpreting visual imagery on our computers by dint of spending so long using them.

That is why we felt ready to forsake Verdana’s clarity for Georgia’s quirky serifs – at least until the next newly fashionable typeface comes along.

Read more at the International Herald Tribune.

While a deep understanding of typography requires lots of study and probably a little bit of obsession, not that a bit of obsession is necessarily a bad thing, learning a few simple rules can make an immediate improvement in your work.

Fortunately, Mark Boulton has given us Five simple steps to better typography, to make the process easier.

IE for Windows is a horror when it comes to following web standards. But it is a well documented horror and there are some tested workarounds for most of its weirdness. It’s just a matter of knowing CSS and testing on the orphan Windows box stuck in the corner behind the conference table.

The major problem with using a Mac for web design is not code based but color. Web pages are just plain text, after all, which I’ve even written on a Palm PDA. The problem is that Windows computers have different standard color settings than Macs. I’m not talking about so-called “web safe” colors. That’s pretty much a non-issue now days. I’m talking about color intensity and saturation. I don’t know if it was Apple or Microsoft that chose to use a different standard for displays but Windows computers display a darker and more saturated screen than do Macs. The technical term is Gamma, which according to Wikipedia is:

“Gamma correction, or often simply Gamma, is the name of an internal adjustment applied to compensate for nonlinearities in imaging systems, in particular those of CRTs in TV and computer displays.”

To put it simply, to see what most of the world sees, it’s necessary to adjust a Mac’s color settings to match Windows. This is not an evil act. Nor is it selling out to the devil in Redmond. Display settings are simply display settings, not a religious issue. If you are doing web design on a Mac and want to see (more or less) what most of your visitors will see you need to adjust your monitor’s gamma settings to match.

Now, color management or correction can be very complicated if you want to match monitor and printer colors. Colorsync does make it much easier on a Mac. But since your output device on the web is another monitor and you can’t control those, you just need to get in the ballpark. And that’s simple.

In System Preferences select Displays, then click on the Color tab. By clicking on the Calibrate button, your Mac will walk you through a calibration wizard. Just make sure you click on the 2.2 gamma setting rather than the 1.8 that is standard for Macintosh. You won’t see quite the saturation of a Windows display but it will be close enough for web work.

If you want to get more deeply into color management try Color Management with Mac OS X Tiger(3.2 MB PDF from Apple).

I probably won’t use my very best shots on the site but keep those for my own work. It’s my time after all. But even so, my second best will be much better than the CD full of truly bad shots the client gave me to work with.

I don’t know why people think that just buying a good camera will make them good photographers. Even though most current cameras have excellent auto-focus and very clever light metering, sharp, properly exposed photos don’t translate into interesting photos. And poor photos of beautiful scenery are still poor photos.

The person who took the original shots I’ll be retaking has absolutely no understanding of what makes a decent photograph. Most of the pictures have no single subject. They are just shots pointed in a general direction. If there is a focal point, it’s dead center in the picture. A basic understanding of the rule of thirds would have helped immensely. Even the simple knowledge that a photo needs a subject to hold any interest at all would have made a huge difference. A quick and judicial crop can often help the center focal point problem. But if there is no focal point at all or it’s so tiny as to be lost in the background we’ve all wasted our time.

Great photography is a blend of art and science with some natural talent and years of practice blended in. Competent outdoor photography is mostly a matter of learning and practicing a few reasonably simple rules. In this case, competent would have been just fine.

Since this particular website will be seen by many local businesses, I don’t want to lower the quality of my product buy using poor photos. And since the site has expanded well beyond the scope of the original proposal it’s already going to cost appreciably more than estimated. Hence my donated time and mild rant. But scope creep is another subject.