littled.net

In my day-to-day work I’m often to be found searching for answers to my web-woes on Google. Occasionally my searching throws up a really interesting site, either in terms of content or design or more rarely, even both. Yesterday I came across a couple I really liked: they’re both the sites of web designers / developers which manage to tread the line between highlighting the individuals’ web skills and saying a bit more about them.

The first one is Trevor Davis’ site. I can’t remember how I came across this, I think it was probably something to do with a jQuery question I Googled. Anyway, the content on the site is very good indeed and I like its design. It’s very clean with a three-column layout, has clear navigation and has some nice touches, like the Twitter bubble by the site logo and the small “Who am I?” section in the top right which links off to his “About” section.

The only (small) criticism I would make of it is that the pages are slightly too long, but that’s just my personal view.

The second site which I found whilst searching for a Twitter plugin for Wordpress, is Victoria Chan’s site, Vicissitude. This site takes a different approach from the one above in the sense that the design is more to the fore, whereas I’d say that with Trevor’s site the design is more in the “background” which allows the content to stand out. This is not to say that Victoria’s site is design over substance; far from it. Again, there is a lot of good content on here and I think it is very well-structured in terms of layout and navigation.

Victoria’s navigation is structured according to her main interests, displayed as key words, e.g. “Geek”, “Artist” etc. I like this approach, it’s very informal and it manages to give you an overview of her without you even needing to delve too deep into the content. I also like the way she has positioned the three navigation items at the top: “All posts”, “History” and “Twitter Updater”, the latter a link to her Twitter Wordpress plugin. Again, if I were forced to make one tiny (ridiculously tiny at that) criticism  it would be that “History”, a history of updates to the site need not to be given such prominence.

Anyway, as with Trevor’s site, there are some great little flourishes: the newest story highlighted in its own box at the top of the page, a nice little “About” section in the top right and the “Cyberstalk me” section which links off to her other presences on the web. Ok, not that new in itself, but it’s great wording.

This all makes me think that I should put some time into developing a new design for this site (rather than relying on a third party one) which I will do in time, probably in conjunction with some other upcoming projects, and it’s always good to get some inspiration. I was thinking of instituting a “site of the week” section on my blog, but I know it would soon become “site of the month” or “site of the undisclosed but infrequent time period”, which is not so quite so catchy.