Site Redesign

The old Logic Colony website was little more than a placeholder page and a Wordpress powered blog. Having quickly got bored of applying Wordpress security updates, I finally got on with the task of launching a proper website.

There are some pretty clear and simple goals for this new website:

• a clean minimalist design; the content has to be the focus, free of the typical detritus of Web 2.0 design elements.
• it must be easy to print the content of the site.
• the site must provide the ability to collate and search links, notes and product/client information.

Design Inspirations

Google is obviously a big influence. Simple, unobtrusive, a perfect example of form following function. Cue one search box prominently placed on the front page, and also a search box on every page of the site.

I've also been a big fan of Ryan Tomayko's blog, and it seems like he pretty much had similar goals for his blogging engine. Personally, I don't agree with all of Tufte's ideas about UI design, but that's probably worth a whole separate post in itself.

Another big inspiration are sites like Reddit and Delicious. Sharing useful and informative links with any readers of the site (be they clients or otherwise) just seems like a pretty useful thing to do. The links served on the front page are a selection from the Logic Colony delicious account - another site with a famously spartan approach to design.

Tagging is a Web 2.0 staple that has been shamelessly appropriated from my two favourite tag enabled sites: Flickr and Delicious.

Why bother writing this?

One of the biggest issues I think we see across development projects is the lack of documentation regarding the rationale of design decisions. Capturing requirements is not enough. 6 months from project inception you or your client may well look at some of the work you have produced and wonder 'Why does this design element, work like this? It makes no sense!'. Of course, 6 months ago, in a now long forgotten context, that design decision made perfect sense.

Losing the rationale for the design means you risk throwing out good work for a bad reason.

This note is my attempt to capture the design rationale behind the current Logic Colony site. Within a week of launching the site, I've already decided to revisit one of the biggest decisions I had made for the site: comments.

It's the conversation, stupid!

Comment spam is Hell.

The old Logic Colony blog was swamped with it, and the WordPress administration pages just couldn't handle the load well. The initial decision for the new site was to have no support for comments whatsoever. It wasn't an easy decision; there had been some good, edifying discussions on a few of the blog posts on the old site. However, the thought of having to manage a deluge of comment spam or having to implement a workaround system (such as CAPTCHA) seemed like too much effort.

1 week later I've decided it is worth the effort.

Why the change of heart? When researching some technical issues on other projects during the week, I have often found some really great insights in comments people have posted against various blog posts. The sheer utility of the discussion prompted by a blog post/article/picture is just something that's too great to pass up. So, comments are coming back, most likely via Disqus. Watch this space.

Krishna Kotecha

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Tagged with: design rationale sitenews