Fireworks, Monuments and The Big Picture

As I sat and watched the town fireworks on the 4th of July, a thought popped in my head. Here I was, among many others, enjoying the brilliant colors, loud noises and powerful blasts of the pyrotechnics, which faded so quickly. Yet, they were an extremely enjoyable spectacle. Why else would we have to fight crowds to see them? But what if fireworks were shot off every night? Besides our taxes being raised roughly 20% to cover the cost, we'd quickly get bored, and probably even annoyed, by them. Part of what makes them special is their relatively rare occurrence.

As a celebration of our independence, fireworks are very temporary and not very meaningful. That's why we have monuments, like the new WWII memorial, Mt. Rushmore, and all of the other monuments scattered across the nation. They are buildings, sculptures, structures or places that honor an individual or group, and they are relatively permanent and typically have some meaning behind them.

These thoughts then got me thinking about website design (see, I take a day off and I'm still thinking about this stuff!). On the web, many designers often get caught up with the "fireworks" of design: the flashy menu, the abstract designs, the modern layouts. These sites scream "look at me and all my cool stuff", but rarely have enough substance to retain a visitors attention for more than a few minutes. Sometimes they even drive visitors away because their sites take too long to load, like the person who stays at home instead of going to see the fireworks because they don't want to fight the crowds, or because the "cool stuff" becomes old and no longer useful or enjoyable, like the person who gets to see fireworks on a regular basis.

However, when you look at the stalwarts of the internet, like Google, eBay and Amazon, we see a much different approach. These companies put together simple designs and focus on the functionality of their sites. These sites are easy to use and easy to figure out. In fact, the core appearance of these sites hasn't changed in years. They're sites anyone can appreciate almost any day they want to, making them the "monuments" of the internet.

When we design websites, we should be striving to create "monuments". We want our sites to develop a permanence, not to fade quickly into the night. Sure, the "fireworks" and gimmicks can be cool for a short time, but they quickly get old, causing designers to go back and come up with the next big thing. With a "monument" we can work with the core functionality of the site and then create more substance upon it, to make it a meaningful place on the web.