Gobbledygook Techfest Websites
Website designers should aim at making the content readable to others, and not just fancy. Build user-centered websites which would help communicate the idea of techfest to other students across the state, and country, probably.
The Problem
No more than a couple of curious, bored-up minds would have read the text displayed on the Paramarsh’s homepage. What good to put much efforts to such things which ends up with no value to the producer and the consumer of the content.
The fanciest fonts and the wildest English vocabulary don’t help website builders look cool. Neither does it help showing off their skills — institute’s negative impression may come at a free cost.
With user perspective, the fanciness adds up no value to the creators and the builders. Neither does it help them pass on the message they are supposed to communicate to the outsiders.
With developer’s perspective, fanciness of a site has a tradeoff — the load time of the site. Loading custom fonts and animations take few tens of seconds to load and display before a user could interact with the web page.
The Solution
To communicate your central message in a better way, creating a user-centered website would be a solution. Before creating a site, do your homework — ask yourself this three basic questions:
- What are you building?
- For whom are you building?
- Why are you building?
Answering this three questions would clear the air — and give you space to think of creating something unusual.
While building a website, try
- having a common user flow to the website.
- not using fancy, unrelatable event names.
- using simple English.
- having a responsive website.
Before publishing the website ask the real users to surf through the website and share their first impression about the website. Give them a task to perform — what events are listed under X department, find me the contact detail of the coordinator of event Y, where can I register for the night-show. The results of this research would say it all.
Summary
Build a minimal website that needs no external explanation. Simple, precise, and user-center.
Bonus: gobbledygook means a language that is made unintelligible by excessive use of technical terms.
You have reached the end of this article. I hope that I made my point clear.
