Thinking About… Development

DISCLAIMER : If you’re not interested in web design/ development and some of my thoughts and plans regarding it over the next few months, don’t even bother clicking on the “more” link underneath – you’d just be bored!

Still with me? OK, great. Here goes then.

Over the last month or so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Web Development, and all the gubbins/hype/bullshit around Web 2.0. I’ve also been reading a lot of things about Web 2.0 widgets, and how cool and useful they are, along with the “design standards” for the newest, latest, greatest websites – things like Flickr, Picasa, and any number of super-groovy things that all seem to have similar design traits. Things like graphic gradients (the graduated change from one colour to another – look at 9 rules (particularly the sides of the page) or 31three for some examples), big fonts (again, Flickr, Qoop, countless others) , white backgrounds with pastel colours, all that kind of gubbins.

Anyway, having looked at a lot of these widgets and sites, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that I’m either a) hugely behind the times, or b) simply not caught up in hype and bullshit. In lots of the cases, I can see where the function might be useful to a small group of people – perhaps – but a lot of it looks like cool ideas being developed with no real concept of usability, or of what those things can be used for. I just don’t get why it’s useful to have the ability to drag-and-drop widgets all round a web-page like Zoozio, NetVibes or Eskobo. (And what’s with all these dumb names, too? They’re all inherently meaningless and nonsense.)

The basic site ideas I’m working on at the moment aren’t compliant with all the “Web 2.0” guff that’s currently flying around. Yes, they’ll have a lot of functionality, but it’s not going to be whizzy AJAX-type widgets, or involve the ability to move things around to match with how a specific user wants the page to look. There’s likely to be the ability to change the page in some ways, to decide what they want to see, and what they don’t. But I suppose in that way I’m still stuck on “Web 1.0” – making things work and be usable, without having to use all manner of dongles and plug-ins.

To my mind people want a website to “just work”. They don’t want to have to change things around, or to understand new paradigms of how things can be done. I’m looking at things where I could end up with anything up to 250,000 users – possibly more, I haven’t done the full set of sums yet. I don’t want to have to deal with shedloads of requests about “why doesn’t x work?“. If I’m going to go the Web 2.0 route at some point – and, to be honest, I’m currently not at all convinced that I will do – then I want to do it in a slow and gradual way that spoonfeeds it to users, rather than forcing them to take it all at once.