Andrea Gandino

The Web is a highly dinamic medium. It is used by a large variety of people, each one of them with different attitudes and problems.

In this kaleidoscope of options and possibilities, I sort of get lost when it comes to judge what it’s good and what it’s not. What does it mean the adjective good applied to websites, anyway? Does it mean good-looking? Or good at ease of use? Nah, we need a higher degree of specificity.

We need an example too. The print world comes to mind. You’ve got a piece of paper, say, you paint, write, print your artwork, and the result it’s there, right before your eyes. It is not influenced by external factors. For the Web this is not true.

Every content is accessed via a third party application: the browser. So it’s not a direct connection between the author and the reader. Software gets in the way. And this is good, as software provides the means to avoid the kind of unevennesses we’ve talked about right at the beginning.

Pick a short-sighted person, for example. He/she might not be able to, say, read or distinguish a little detail you’ve so lovely put in your printed handcrafted artwork. No problem: he/she puts glasses on, or makes use of a magnifying glass. The gap between his/her problem and you, the author willing to convey a message, is filled.

A similar, yet more subtle, situation happens with Web pages. Now, the same short-sighted person fires up his/her computer and loads a website that he/she cannot read, as it’s written too small. The deus ex machina role is played by the browser that (should) provides a robust shortcut to bump up the text size for the whole page.

It happens sometimes that this simple and absolutely ordinary and necessary action, kind of messes up the page layout. When it does, that’s not a good page by any means.

So what is a good page, for me? To me, good is something that ensures that its content is kept accessible, yet is able to present it in a nice and appropriate to the context way.

Technically speaking, I love em-based websites because they nicely adapt themselves to different browsing situations. Em-based layouts are spreading more and more, these days, even at corporate level, which is extremely cool, but still too many times I see websites that are just gorgeus when viewed at default text size, but that fail miserably otherwise.

I came to realize that the goodness of a website had very little to do with its graphic look. Or, at least, a lot less than what one could think.

So what? During these years of constant development, I sort of came up with a quick testing routine that gives me a rough clue of how scalable and flexible is the layout I’m designing.

1. Constantly check your code. XHTML validation is essential, and we should not debate over that topic. A slightly different story applies to CSS validation and the use of non standard properties (such as browser specific implementation of rounded corners). With CSS we can experiment a little bit more. For example adding text-shadow where needed could be possible scenario: browsers that already support it will display it. Others won’t, but that’s fine and acceptable, because it won’t cause much harm to the end-user, right?
2. Again concerning CSS, try not to use hacks. For as ugly and proprietary as they might look, use conditional comments to load up additional browser-specific stylesheets.
3. Turn off styling — This will give you a perfectly clear indication of how good your markup is, and will also give you a hint of what a text browser will read. My rule is: ensure that your website is perfecly readable and understandable even without the fancy graphic stuff. This is called graceful degradation, I think.
4. Repeat the above procedure, this time turning off images. Page size is day after day less a concern, with fast connection speed spreading all over, but there definitely are situations where it does matter how much data you’re downloading (think mobile phones). Browsing with no images to reduce loading times it’s a respectable choice by the end-user and should be honoured, hence the end-user should not be penalized by a imageless layout that’s completely messed up or significantly damaged.
5. Bump up your text a couple of times — There’s a nice shortcut that works in most browsers that is ctrl/cmd++. If your layout stays OK after this, you can sleep quietly tonight. If it doesn’t, you should fix that as soon as possible. Always ensure that your layout is flexible enough to accomodate this not-so-rare situation.

Now, there would be a whole lot more to say on this topic, but for now I think I will leave it like this: if a website is able to pass that little checklist above, then it could well being judged as good. It also has a killer look? Then it’s a winner, to me.

What about you? Which criteria come in play when you judge how good a website is?