Reading websites

Posted on September 18, 2003 @ 09:49 in Research

I have a question for the readers of this weblog. For my research I'm looking at all kinds of aspects of personal home pages and it's obvious that everybody who spends some time on the web has developed a working set of cues and expectations that help him or her interpret the page at hand. At this point I'm looking in particular at the socially meaningful cues embedded in web pages and I've hit upon a very difficult issue:

What cues do we understand to indicate "technical ability" or maybe "technical prowess" in personal home pages and why/how are these cues an indication of technical ability to you?

Related to "technical ability" you may want to consider the "professionality" of personal home pages.

I don't want to influence your thinking at this point, so I'm not going to say what kind of cues I've been looking at myself so far. I will expand on this question later though, or maybe add my 2 cents to the comments, I'm just hoping something new and useful will spring up.

As a corollary to the above question, how would you set up (a very loosely defined) scale or continuum of "technical ability" as related to making personal home pages?

My working definition of a "personal home page" is a non-commercial (not necessarily non-profit) website that is primarily crafted by one person and contains a section or page where s/he presents him/herself.

I appreciate all feedback, either in comments or by mail, and do feel free to link to this post to generate some more traffic :-)

Comments and Trackbacks

  1. if you look around at the people who were the 'internet cabal', the old technicians and such, you will find their homepages are very simple textual affairs looking like they were made in 1993 but updated, those that went seriously commercial now have webpages that are produced by their company more or less, like Vint Cerf's, but others are clearly self-maintained simplicity. However, i am not talking about webheads, more internet and technics oriented people. It is just something i've noticed, i should probably do a bit deeper analysis and write it up.

    Posted by jeremy hunsinger on September 18, 2003 @ 17:36

  2. To me, an important indicator of technical ability is the ability of the author to think like the user.

    So things like clear and consistent navigation and readable page layout can be indicators of technical ability (not just design ability).

    Having said that, lots of people who have blogs just use one of the templates that their blog hosting service provides, which doesn't necessarily indicate the presence or absence of technical ability.

    Another obvious sign of the author's technical ability is valid HTML/CSS/PHP/whatever!

    Posted by angel on September 18, 2003 @ 20:43

  3. First and biggest cue of technical knowledge is the difference between the page and the standard setup of the tool they're using.

    I'm familiar with most of the blogging tools out there and know the default templates. Most people want to modify their personal sites in some way, but the trade-off is between effort and enthusiasm. Mostly, technical skill is needed to change the setup, and the more technical skill you have the less effort is required.

    Posted by fridgemagnet on September 21, 2003 @ 00:39

  4. I disagree with fridgemagnet slightly--I think that the presence of a default template doesn't necessarily indicate the lack of technical skill.

    For example, I have been using a default Blogger template for nearly a year now, not because
    I don't have any technical knowledge (I'm responsible for web design and maintenance at my job), but because I just can't be bothered to spend my time at home coding webpages like I do at work all day long!

    Having said that, I'm sick of looking at the Blogger template, and am working on a new one now! :)

    Posted by angel on September 22, 2003 @ 00:46

  5. Well, but Angel, you may HAVE technical skill but it's probably not goign to be apparent to the reader while you're using a default template.

    There are two axes here, for me, I think. There's the professional look, with the design that shows thought has been put into it and that more is here than strictly necessary, without it's being useless, you know. And then there are those geek sites with a plain text look but lots of stuff under the surface. That's a different kind of technical ability.

    Posted by Jill on September 23, 2003 @ 15:05

  6. You are right, Jill, but all I'm saying is that it's not an indicator of *lack* of skill.

    I agree with your second paragraph completely.

    Posted by angel on September 24, 2003 @ 22:47

  7. I find well-structured CSS and HTML that looks like it's been written by hand to be extremely valid indicators of technical skill -- either in choice of HTML editor, or in capability, both represent that what I'm looking at has some energy applied to it, by someone.

    Many never think about such a thing, a few obsess over it; I fall into the latter camp, and as such, it flags my attention immediately.

    Posted by Richard Soderberg on September 25, 2003 @ 08:05

  8. I agree with Richard - the way HTML and CSS look is a very good skill indicator. Another one is navigability (although less important with small-scale affairs like personal pages) - how well-thought out is the structure of the pages?

    As for blogs, I have no experience with those. I had a quick look at the source for this page, and it looked readable enough. Just how much of it is out-of-the-box and how much Frank tweaked himself, I cannot tell (but it works and reads fine).

    Posted by Arjan on September 29, 2003 @ 11:21

  9. Just for bragging rights: I wrote every template and the stylesheet for this site myself. From the ground up. At the time of writing, you're looking at the 4th major redesign of the site, called vee-4-ooh.

    It took me a week or two to tweak the site into looking and behaving nicely. After it was done and I went for a leisurely surf, I was actually surprised to see how much it resembled Movable Type's default template. It's way different underneath, but I guess there is a certain elegance to the two-column plus header layout that makes it 'natural' to look at and to use.

    Posted by Frank on October 01, 2003 @ 15:21

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