Jakob Nielsen and Camels

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If you’re serious about webdesign and usability, one of the books that should be part of your library is Jakob Nielsen’s Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed. Ok the book is circa 2001 and design has progressed quite a bit since then, and yes I know Jakob comes out and says some bizarre things every now and then, but he does have some good ideas in the book. One of the things he did was take the web page and break it down into different areas, navigation, self promotional, advertising, content, etc. He would show it to you two ways, once as pie chart, and more importantly on the actual pages with color blocks covering the content (I’d show you but I’d probably be breaking all sorts of copyright laws). Anyway it’s an interesting way to asses the “value” of a webpage, and it’s something I’ve trained myself to subconsciously whenever I visit a new webpage.

So I came across this page last night and can’t help but be shocked at the miniscule amount of screen real estate the content actually has. Even more unsettling is viewed at 800×600 none of it is above the fold, at 1024×800 only two sentences are. Just to make it even more wired the banner and footer are full width but the body is capped at 800 pixels wide. Reminds me of a plaque I saw on advertising directors wall “A Camel is horse that was designed by a committee”

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