I remember in the not so distant past, the idea for any website was to make it look as robust as possible. We’d be constantly asked questions like, ‘can we add this section to the home page?’ or ‘we need to find a way to fit this and this into the site’. It then became the designers job to hack things into a website event though they knew it wasn’t very clean or usable. Before we knew it the site became a twisted mess with way too much information that no one was reading in the first place! But truthfully, we were all guilty at some point in the process.

Along came blogs.

When the first blogs came out they weren’t very pretty either. But someone got it in their head to really focus on readability. Large type-faces entered the scene for headers, more readable fonts and fundamental readability practices (i.e. line spacing, paragraph spacing and other elements). It wasn’t too long after this that WordPress came along and the designs became even cleaner.

During this time, Flash started taking a back seat on many sites (big ‘sigh of relief’ for ‘skip intro’ haters) and rightfully so.  It took on more of a useful role in my optinion – where it was actually needed versus just using Flash for the sake of using Flash.  I’ll get back to this in a minute though.

Things started to change when corporate sites started to look more like blogs.  Why not? They were clean, readable and had a strong focus on simplicity. I quite enjoyed this transition.  And when FI launched their blog-like site, then it was on like Donkey Kong.  This became one of the many sparks that created an official ‘ok’ for professional organizations (via online agencies) to go simple.

Other uber-clean oriented sites started showing up like the 1 page portfolios, the larger and larger footer areas and now larger and larger headers. To me, I think this is all pretty cool.  Not everything works, but a lot of the newer design directions are a great improvement over year’s past. Lately, I’m event seeing traditionally Flash-tastic promotional sites go half blog/usable Flash (ie. Flex) oriented.  Ford did this with their recent Mustang Site.

Sadly, many small to medium (and sometimes large) business do not see, care or understand this evolution. The good news is that we are making things cleaner, better and easier for people to do things online. This design evolution bleeds into usability, user experience and development as a whole.

Having recently been converted into a fan of Project Runway, there’s a quote that reverberates in my head spoken by that gorgeous (yet evil) blonde, ‘one day you’re in, the next day you’re out’.  This makes me wonder, when will the simple, clean blog-like feel give way to something else?  Will a site made 10 years ago look good 5 years from now?

I certainly hope not.