Don’t put Schezuan Sauce in an Italian Pizza - A Web Design rant

While I love Schezuan sauce a lot and use it on all my Chinese cooking, still I would not like to put that on top of an  Italian Pizza, they are a completely different style of dishes and don’t go well together. It will make less of a Pizza and not even a proper Chinese dish either. Same is the case with web design.

While that nice flipflop colors may look great on some other site you have visited, but that may not be best suited for your website. Now a days, I see a increasing trend in buyers vision for their new sites is to have all the nice features and widgets they have seen on all sites ever visited, jumbled up together in their site to make their site more attractive. Well that does not work and actually goes a long way in making the site a joke. Every site has unique context and purpose and the style, colors and features should reflect that purpose rather than having every flashy widget they see on the web in their site. 

Sometime back I was working with a medical practitioner for her personal site to grow her business. I had suggested her lighter and sober colors and style to reflect a peaceful ambience and welcoming tone. The buyer instead was adamant that she wants the site in Black. She had recently visited a hip/hop rock music site with a full black design and liked it very much and wanted to use that as a design base for her site. While a shiny black site with high contrast yellow and greens may be a great theme for rockstar site but its definitely a misfit for a medical practitioner. As expected that turned out to be pretty bad design and visitors of the site will no doubt get irked by the color sense of the designer.