Basic Design Philosophy


MOCHI > Site Info > Site Design > Basic Design Philosophy

The basic design philosophy for this site can be summed up as:

Be Simple. If we were going to add a "cool trick", there had to be a really good reason for the "cool trick" -- other than it's "coolness".
Be Useable. The site should be easy to navigate and it should be hard to get lost.
Follow Standards. While many browsers are "stupid" about web standards (HTML, CSS, etc.), it didn't mean that we had to be stupid.
Be Whimsical.

Many of the site considerations center around the idea of mimimizing download time. Members of MOCHI are scattered across a fairly wide geographical area and the site might attract viewers from overseas. Sections that are particuarly image-intensive (like the scrapbook) are "peeled off" into their own area. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are used to "style" the content: effects like indented paragraphs, colored areas, and special spacing are handled by the browser -- which means that the actual HTML file can be smaller.

(Yes, some of the CSS things will look goofy depending on what browser you look at it with. In most cases, the goofiness should not affect your ability to actually get at the content of the page. The Evil Web Tyrant firmly believes that if people can't write their browsers to understand a clearly defined standard, it is not the Tryant's place to bend over backwards to accomdate them.)

The pages are also a bit on the "thin" side: any large graphics or series of graphics are done to take up no more than about 540 pixels across and the content of the pages is fairly short. This was originally done to accomdate WebTV: there is no horizontal scrolling and the size of the fonts, etc. usually a lot more vertical scrolling. The fact that this made the pages smaller and faster to load was a happy side effect quickly embraced by the Evil Web Tyrant. However, the pages should also look decent if viewed in a larger window. Some elements are designed to look "open" / "airy" to help this.