A new website and the KISS principle

"Keep it simple, stupid." KISS is a design principle that suggests unnecessary complexity should be avoided. I sure learned that lesson after trying to maintain the last website I designed. This time around that principle guided my design. Plus, it works well with another design principle - "less is more."

Last time I built my website (was it really 5 years ago?), I created all these cool, fancy rollovers, which resulted in a lot of cursing while I worked. And what do you think happened later when I needed to change or update one of those "rollover" words? More cursing. And do you really think anyone noticed that when they scrolled their mouse over the navigational words that the words changed colors? I'm betting not. Nobody but me probably gave it a thought or said "ooh cooooool."

There were layered galleries with complex rollovers for showing and hiding images and their names. A real bear to create with the program I was using-it was a fussy series of arranging and naming parts and if you got one little thing out of place, it failed-but it wasn't always readily clear what the problem was.

So what was the end result? Certainly not much updating of any of those gallery pages, that's for sure. As a matter of fact, I had a gallery named "new" (never do that) with images that were 5 years old. Now that's an up-to-date website.... yeah, right.

This time around? A logo, navigational words that don't do anything fancy, and pictures that just sit there and look pretty. One gallery. It will be easy enough to add pages to the gallery later - I know I want to put up another page of work since I have none of my earrings shown. But seriously, this took sooooo much less time - and in the end, does just as good a job (maybe better) of showcasing my work and linking to places like my etsy shop and blog. Why all the fuss? Here's my advice: keep it simple... ;-)

http://cdpdesigns.com