Yesterday at the Dorchester Hotel in London (England, for daft Americans), I was presented with the NatWest/BT Iris Award which recognises the most successful woman to have the most significant “business success and growth” as a result of successful application and use of communications and I.T.

Awarded by the wfie of the Prime Minister.

In competition with every other woman in business in the UK.

Surely these people looked at my website first? As normal users (instead of theoretically minded book readers) they will have found it lively (ahem), fun, exciting, successful and inspiring.

Quote: “The 2009 NatWest everywoman Awards took place on Wednesday, 2 December. Sarah Brown provided a keynote speech before eight fantastic women were awarded for their outstanding entrepreneurial and inspirational achievements.”

Not that I am so wonderful I don’t realise my website is “hand crafted” and divides opinion, but really Jess – you need to read less books.

Ling
LINGsCARS

Wish You a Merry Christmas.

Of course my website is USABLE and ACCESSIBLE, proven by the fact that many thousands of UK subjects have got new cars from it.

Would it be controvertial to suggest that my target audience (ie credit-worthy 25 to 55 year old, UK subjects top 30 percentile with good income) are reasonably intelligent enough to figure it out? I simply don’t dumb things down for the lowest common denominator.

Maybe that is your point?

Ling
LINGsCARS

You DON’T know what you are doing… why? : because you haven’t done it! You are just trotting out other people’s conventions.

Your certain/definite views are is criticising and “correcting” people who HAVE done it, whereas with all your expert opinion, you have not created a single successful transactional website, yourself (ie one that is reasonably profitable).

You are a classic “expert” who has never walked the walk, never putting your own neck on the line – just commenting about others. And many people swallow your “wisdom”.

As for your assertion that the internet is 40 years old, well, I wonder how many websites there were in 1969? Exactly. None.

Or in 1979, or in 1989. You are talking about pre-tcp/ip university/military networks.

Windows didn’t even have a workable browser in 1995!

There were a reasonable number of websites in 1999, but then, even Google wasn’t around. We had idiots like Boo.com blowing £millions on rubbish.

If you *KNOW* what you are talking about, for goodness sake put it into practise! Show us what a successful transactional selling site you can build and run. But you don’t. You just go on about theory.

As for those sites which suggest mine is ugly: fine. Let them. Great, they vreat traffic. At least they talk about my site! So what if my website is ugly? Some of the most successful things are ugly. The VW Beetle was ugly, the Apache helicopter is ugly. A lot of art is ugly. A cockroach is ugly. A lot of brilliant people are ugly.

Since when has UGLY got anything to do with anything? Is this the age of vanity talking?

When you say a lot of people here have experience of how sites *SHOULD* look, who is writing the rules about websites that these people trot out? Who is saying what should and what should-not be allowed? Are your pals here web policemen, or web magistrates? Or are they web art-critics?

If everyone played by the made-up “rules” that you defend, nothing new, ground-breaking or inspirational would be built. Before YouTube, YouTube would have broken the rules.

Before Google, Google would have broken the “rules” about how search engines should look and work.

Jess, you are good at trotting out “rules” that higher beings seem to have written, but in truth the web is incredibly immature, there are zillions of crazy, ugly, strange and “rule-breaking” things that you would stifle, if you had your way.

Open your mind (and have a go yourself!). It’s this “rule-breaking” that pushes things forward, and thank God for that!

Ling
LINGsCARS

Remember, like my comments in the original post, it’s all about the face value/usability and not the functionality. No one has a major issue with the functionality, it’s all about how it’s designed.

Like I said in my other post – this is advice, and there are some people here (excluding Ling and Alvin) that do have a lot of experience within the web sphere and how sites should look. If you don’t want to take the advice that is being provided to you in a constructive manner, then don’t but please don’t start saying that we don’t know what we’re doing.

The internet turned 40 just this year, and of course there are a lot of changes that have happened and you are right, styles may change in the next ten years – but usability will always be there. Usability is the interface between humans and technology and if that isn’t working then they won’t be able to use the website.

You can push boundaries and still have a usable site. If you look at usability articles on the internet, then you will see that most of the ways to implement better usability are quite simple and won’t remove the ‘vibe’ of your website.

We’re supposed to be pushing *forwards*.

I almost completely agree with you, especially that we are dealing with a very immature thing (the web). I must say that people who suggest THIS or THAT is “correct” may look back in 10 years and feel slightly silly. Frankly you can do anything you want, and who knows… it may work?

Really we all need to push boundaries as who knows where development will take things. Thanks very much for that great post!

Ling
LINGsCARS

Truthfully, when I first landed on Ling’s website I felt like someone was poking a needle in my eye – but then, I’m a designer and I eat sexy websites for breakfast so I’m probably not the person to be making a non-bias opinion.

However after taking some time to look through it I found that it was, surprisingly, fairly easy to navigate around – albeit a little “noisy”, however not disruptively so.

I believe that one of the reasons Ling’s website appears to succeed is due to the personality Ling attributes to the website via the quirky comments, “moan” sections, and an edgy and fun approach to doing business. Another reason is the functionality of the site, of which there seems to be a consensus that it excels in delivering the functionality customers need.

I believe Jess was using Ling’s website purely as a surface-level illustration of design that cannot be considered to pass usability tests, which is something – I know, as a designer – is sadly neglected in many young designers. Jess was obviously not taking into account Ling’s complete online operations and was not making a value-judgement of Ling’s business success.

I do have one bone to pick, however.

Ling, to say that there are “no rules” in web design is, while technically true as there are no legal bodies governing the Internet, it is sadly misjudging the long-term benefits of establishing standard practice in digital publication. (To clarify, we’re talking about a GENERAL web design issue here, not your website in particular.)
Standards do have an impact on a user’s experience. See –> http://bit.ly/6fY6YW

Take programming as an example. There’s more than one way to write a piece of software. If there were no standards, such as outlined by the Object-Oriented approach which highlights code re-use, then software houses would waste a fortune fixing bad code that was written by programmers who wanted to churn out code fast rather than abide by standards. Web standards are not just for users. They’re for the designers and programmers too, to help keep the project clean, ordered, and extendable.

That said, I love your “outside-the-box” approach to your website. I think it’s bold, slightly crazy, but intriguingly provocative of free-thought amongst designers, which is never a bad thing.

Bravo on your success, but let’s remember the web is yet to reach maturity in its development and the practices we promote now will enrich the quality of work we see on the web in the future.