Busy layouts

There are websites that are designed minimalistic.Take Web Standards Awards as an example. There isn’t really much going on on the frontpage. No ads all over the place, no colums with the latest submissions, user comments and all that stuff.

There are also sites that do have all of this. Take a look at CSS Beauty. Although it also has a clean and nice design, there is much more going: news and announcements, latest gallery, archives links, recommended section, advertisments, job openings, latest discussions, and features.

Why this comparison? Well, when I surf the web for information I always have the impression that the sites with more buzz on their pages are the sites that are more established, have a larger user-base and are more likely have interesting and more things to say I might want to check back for. I don’t know whether this is just me or a general feeling more people have though. If my impression is shared by many people, it would be an advantage to create your site with a little more dynamism in order to have users evaluate your site as more imortant.

Recently Gitte Lindgaard found that “internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye”. So even if both types of websites have the same quality of content, they are potentially evaluated differently in the first 50 milliseconds. Speaking for myself and combinig things, I probably judge a site with a “busy” layout as more important in those first few milliseconds.

However I don’t know if I’m alone with this. If this accounts for most people it’s certainly a factor to take into account when designing a site.