The Pleasing, The Ugly and the Aesthetics

Aesthetics
Aesthetics is an interesting word. It specifically relates to the philosophic study of the way human sensors perceive things and the emotional responses that result. The area of study for example looks at why some things elicit emotions of disgust like a decomposing animal while others such as flowers usually give positive emotion. This idea is very pertinent to web design as users want aesthetically pleasing content to view and web designers and programmers want to be able to provide an aesthetically pleasing web experience to their users. An interesting note about aesthetics is that different cultures have different ideas of what is aesthetically pleasing. These differences can be seen in architecture, art and what type of human features are considered pleasing. When taking about aesthetics in reference to the World Wide Web the functionality of the content must also be considered because of the functional purpose and nature of the Web.

Wiki site on Aesthetics


A Pleasing Website
A website that I find find pleasing is Apple.com. This website is both nice to look at and highly functional. The site maintains a common theme throughout its various areas and is both easy to use and highly functional. I have found that accessing the various areas of this website requires less navigation and the navigation is more intuitive. The text is very clear and the menu system takes up minimal area. The website scales well onto my large widescreen display allowing me to take full advantage of the enlarges screen area. Importantly most of the high level screens contain few images to speed the load process and when media is integrated it is seamless unlike many other websites which have weird embedded players that feel out of place. Pages on the site that are updated regularly have very nice history interfaces as well. In terms of look the website in minimalist with black text on white background. Apple.com is a great example of a visually pleasing website that does not skimp on functionality much like Apples OS X.

Ugly Website
An example of a ugly website would be HRODC.com. I am not going to comment on the content of this website but focus on it terrible aesthetics and prehistoric functionality. Firstly the colours, speckled grey background with bright red text boxes filled with crammed white text and over six different fonts and a bit of bright yellow for good measure. This site makes use of the most annoying and useless html feature; scrolling text, the most annoying of which tells the site visitor t scroll down to see the vast mass of links and tables which make the front page about 10 000 pixels long. No one in their right mind would care to navigate to the depth of the front page let alone seek anything further inside. This website does not take into account its users. The website is also very hard to understand because of the lack of unifying design. With no common design ideas each section is ordered differently and behaves differently. Not only is this website creating a terrible impression on anyone but it could definitely loose the company business.