The Dynamics of Being Dynamic
Posted by Kevin Hazard, January 29th, 2007
If you’ve frequented Site5’s home page over the last few years, you are well aware that our main area of consistency is in our impressive lack of consistency. If you have joined the game late, you can use an internet archiver like the Wayback Machine to get a blast from the past and see how our site has changed over time. Click the thumbnails for a larger screenshot.
Rod already wrote a great post to break down the hosting industry’s aversion to change, so I will share a bit of our experience in having a dynamic site. Recently, I was surfing Technorati, and I saw that CSS Mania added a page to rank Site5’s design, so I decided to take a walk down memory lane to see how far the site has come in the past eight years.
I didn’t include screenshots of the infamous “bright pink” design, the “orange is the new pink” design, the “baby blue” design, nor the “neon green isn’t used enough” design, but the first few iterations of Site5’s homepage do well to show how the site (and the company) has evolved to the current state.
There is a huge learning curve in site design. Because Matt and Rod built our site from the ground up as their earliest html/php projects, the first designs were probably as much limited by ability as they were designed with intent. I posted a list of pet peeves which these old pages vehemently violated, but we have learned a great deal about effective web design from these prior versions. Effective site design should be seen as a continual process, not a goal to reach and forget about.
In my extremely biased opinion, Site5’s homepage layout has come to be one of the best in the industry in its usability and aesthetics, and I would attribute a significant amount our order growth to its dynamic nature and all of the personal touches. Either that, or Matt and Rod are the type of people who are wont to change things up every now and again. After all, they’ve been co-authoring the Site5.com website for over eight years now. That’s a long time on the Internet.
The Value of Change
Static web pages are boring. The fact that a company is exciting does not automatically translate into that company’s web page, and with the expanse of the internet, you risk a significant amount of traffic when you ignore this important aspect. I know the arguments for establishing a “look and feel” for a company in a branding sense, but at some point that becomes a cop-out for not being creative enough to adapt to how your company is growing and changing. The best part about the value of a dynamic site is that it can be done without significant changes to the site’s design if you want to keep that “look and feel.” You can change images, mix up colors, or revamp content to make your site worth visiting again… If you never change anything and don’t offer any kind of residual value for future visits, you implicitly plant a “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt” mentality in your visitors.
We have learned from experience that dynamicism (still making up new words when applicable) does not necessarily entail going the way of every “nex-gen” fad, but often you can learn a lot about design from current popular opinion. Even if they only give you ideas for minor tweaks, you have avenues to make your site re-visitable in some capacity (letting visitors take something new from your site the next time they visit). If you are an anti-establishment, anti-majority, free spirit, you can get ideas of how to rid yourself of any potentially incriminating popular design ideas.
I, personally, will simply maintain my original style of adopting fads several years after they fall out of popularity. If you will excuse me, I need to get to a Magic Card/ POG conference in my backward jeans, unwashed flannel shirt, Timberlands, and Kangol.
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