Your house, like mine, probably consists of entries, rooms, hallways, closets, and miscellaneous items to help us run our daily lives. When you open the bathroom door, you expect a toilet, not a wandering herd of donkeys in gorilla costumes.

I’d say a good 99% of us like our homes to be laid out in such a way as to enhance our everyday living – we expect and/or require them to have some modicum of functionality.

Web sites should be the same way. Even a visitor who’s never been to the site before should immediately get a feel for where they are, where they can go, and what information will be waiting for them when they navigate away from their current spot.

My question is: Why do so many architects have dysfunctional websites?

Here are just a few examples:

• Nobel Prize winning architect Zaha-Hadid. Why do I like a blindfolded mouse in a lab maze? The navigation is designed like a tangled knot of electrical cords.
• Alison Brooks Architects. It starts with an epileptic fit of barely visible words on ill-looking chartreuse canvas. When I enter the site, I can’t scroll down to see all the navigation and content. Oh well, I don’t care if you did win the Riba Manser Medal for the Salt House.
• Yamasaki Inc., the founder of which designed the old World Trade Center. This site is totally broken when viewed in Firefox. When I open it in Explorer, the navigation literally jumps away from me.

Architects take note: your online visitors are opening doors that lead to brick walls.

(P.S. ArcStone has been blueprinting websites for over 10 years.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.