Fringe Politics and the Conspiracy of Bad Design

I, for one, love read­ing blogs. I read blogs that cen­ter around stuff I don’t even care about. I espe­cially like infor­ma­tion of the fol­low­ing vari­ety. I’m no fan of the US Gov­ern­ment or the IRS (yup, I went there) for the sheer fact that they want to take the money I earn by help­ing folks with their web pres­ence and give it to idiots who gam­ble it all away (see, the bailout, in case you’ve been in a box for the past few months).

The one thing that always amazes me is the fact that peo­ple who want to be taken seri­ously are usu­ally the last ones to present their infor­ma­tion in a man­ner that will make this pos­si­ble. I know peo­ple use words like “con­spir­acy the­ory” to describe every­thing that doesn’t fit the party line, but we should really hear the thing out before pass­ing judg­ment. If only they would pack­age it so that we could…

Why are all of these sites the same?

This site, like so many oth­ers, misses the pack­ag­ing mark. Why, when the web is your prin­ci­ple method of dis­sem­i­nat­ing infor­ma­tion, would you not pack­age it for a web audi­ence? I’ve read the stuff, and while I don’t know what to make of it, I do know that the design sucks. With­out fur­ther ado, I give you, the Com­pre­hen­sive Annual Finan­cial Report expose website.

So, what’s wrong? We see this a lot with black back­ground sites wherein the owner doesn’t think break­ing up text is a good idea. Of course, who doesn’t want to read every­thing there is to read all at once. Why not put it all in there so that there’s lit­tle chance of our read­ers remem­ber­ing where they were should they need to come back? And, while we’re at it, why not throw in motion graph­ics and a bunch of car­toons. That’ll make our mes­sage res­onate with our tar­get audi­ence, right?

Let me be clear about this. There is NO chance in hell peo­ple will look at this type of site and think, “Hey, this guy is a poten­tial leader for a move­ment of like minded folk, and I should sup­port his cause.” In fact, any­one who has been raised on CNN will cer­tainly think that this is all a bunch of “con­spir­acy the­o­rist” crap. Come on, admit it, that’s what you think…

Now, would you give it a fair shake if the design didn’t look like it was done by a third grader with a “blue” obses­sion? You’d at least read past the head­line, right? Well, if you have infor­ma­tion to pass, pack­ag­ing is as impor­tant as con­tent, if not more so. Ask McDonald’s. Great pack­ag­ing, lousy con­tent, and it works pretty well for them (prob­a­bly gonna get sued for that one).

Cheers!

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