Old Personal Web Site Design

INFO SCIENCE: This was an initial design for a personal webpage a few years back. I never ended up using it, but if anyone wants to snap up any of the graphics for other projects, be my guest. (Click for full view.)











I never really liked this layout style (with categories listed along the top a la Amazon), even though I've used it before and probably will again. It's a very limiting practice and most sites are better simply listing the categories in the body of the page, like Google's Directory Page. This setup gives you room to expand and also give you room to use bread crumbs (tips and examples of the content) for each category. (And bread crumbs are always a good idea.) Alternatively, you can list categories along the left column, like The New York Times, however, this can be a bit cramped and your descriptions must be terse.



The other big problem with this sort of site design is the big bounding boxes. What was I thinking? Nobody should still be using these. It's just clutter for the sake of clutter. It's also a cop-out; just make your webpage work at any resolution. Whenever I use grids now, be it html or a spreadsheet, I use either a very light grey or a medium yellow. Just enough to guide the eyes between sets of related information and for grouping groups without making the grid the focal point instead of the content or data.