Functionality vs Design

In today's modern and evolving Internetional (Internet-wide) community, the larger focus has shifted from one side to the other.
Functionality and design are the two principles that govern webpages (and many other things in the real world, too). At the moment, focus lies on the side of functionality over design.


One would've thought that as we move into a future where higher connection speeds are becoming more common place, it would open the doors for more extravagant design, one day making people on the "ol' 56k" forced to upgrade due to increasing bandwidth-requirements for certain websites.
However, it seems that we've taken a step back in that regard, as more focus is placed on functionality and how a website works rather than how pretty it is.

Take for example websites such as Flickr, Reddit, and Digg.

If you visit these websites, you can see a lot of whitespace, and very little in the way of super-bright and illuminating banners, no Flash at all, and a very simple design. That is because the creators of these websites have chosen to run with functionality over design as the governing principle. Those in the 'know' call this Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is the buzzword used to describe the "next-gen" of websites.
The core principle of Web 2.0 is user-driven content. That is why websites like the above are really the first to embrace the Web 2.0 ideals, because they are user-driven. Digg and Reddit both rely on news-content submitted by users to fuel their websites, while Flickr is centered on photographic user-submitted content.

These websites, while perhaps looking meek (in a stylish way) propose huge user functionality. You can do a million different things on these websites, and that is what makes them superior. While the company employees that are behind these works of art focus on maintaining the website for the users, the users in turn do the work and bring popularity to the site for the companies. Nintendo may have received a bucketload of free press when it came out with the outrageous decision about changing the Revolution to the Wii, but did the Nintendo fans build the console for them? No, but Digg, Reddit and Flickr's users built their website, while at the same time providing a continuous stream of free publicity to their sites. Digg.com has almost no advertisements (I haven't seen any at all) yet it's a hugely popular site (rated 110 according to Alexa at the time of this post.)

To a lesser (I say that loosely considering its huge success) extent, MySpace.com has also followed in the footsteps of these websites. Although it also has an eyecandy aspect to it, MySpace users love the ability to have complete control over their personal webpage in an easy-to-maintain environment. It could almost be dubbed a WIDE (Web-based Integrated Development Environment, I claim all rights to the acronym).



Sorry to all of you that thought you were a hotshot at Photoshop and are willing to pursue a career in web design. Good luck with your ambitions, but you may consider moving to a purely functionality-specialised career instead. It seems that's where the future is headed.


~a friend in need is a friend indeed, but a friend that has a free server combined with LAMP is better