Simple, lightweight pages

You may have noticed that these pages are all very simple and uncluttered with graphics. This makes them lightweight and fast loading. I like them this way. I hate "portals", like MSN and CNN.com for example. Don�t get me wrong, CNN.com is a great site - lots of great news, of course, and I read CNN pretty much daily. The so-called "writing" at MSN however is pretty dumbed down, oversimplified, and annoying. What can you expect from Microsoft I guess. It wouldn't bother me so much if they didn't have such good, enticing hooks for their stories. Oh yes, MSN is good at teasers. "That sounds interesting, I think I'll read it" I always think. And I'm always disappointed afterward. Every time.

Anyway, the design of these sites are portals. A site that tries to be all things to all people. A stupid graphic "button" for every link, and portals usually end up using a 2 point illegible font to cram in all the info they want you to see "above the fold", meaning the point where you�d have to scroll down to see more of the page. All those silly graphics for each button and tab slice usually weigh portals down sooo much that they are slow loading even from the fastest servers over broadband.

I remember hearing that because of this, portals were considered pass� and would soon go the way of the dinosaur. Well they didn�t. All this being said, there are far worse portals than CNN (MSN is worse for one). For a portal, CNN really isn�t too bad. Still, I can�t believe so many new sites keep adopting the portal design approach. Sucking up bandwidth like black holes, making everyone wait for them to load. And when they have loaded, they overwhelm the user with far too much information, making them really hunt for what they're looking for. Usually I balk at this and the only thing I hunt for is the dang search box, and go from there. Usually when faced with your typical portal I can never "find what I'm looking for". At least not without far too much effort.

So, at least with my blog, I plan to keep it simple. And I don�t think GeoCities here uses the best, fastest servers� I can�t say I�ll never post a picture - I certainly will if it�s the picture I want to talk about, but generally, I don�t plan to make this site any more complicated than one easily can with plain, good ol� html and notepad! In fact, there�s one of the few graphics I�ll use frequently right there.

Maybe someday if I get really wild and crazy I�ll change the background color from this nice, lovely, pale yellow to something else. Like beige maybe.

A week after I wrote this, I took back what I said about CNN and ranted about portals some more.





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