Hey friend,
Welcome back to WM Design Opinions, Opinion 2 of 6.
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Now, let’s talk about your often-overlooked collaborator: Future You.
Design Opinion #2: Future You is your most important collaborator
Good web design isn’t only about how things look when your site launches; it’s about how well it can adapt to the inevitable changes your business will throw at it later. Good design should make making changes and updates feel effortless.
I’m gonna rag on Squarespace, because I love them. An example of bad design is the Squarespace “Home” button in the backend editor.
Almost every time I go to edit a Squarespace website, I naturally hit this home button trying to get to my “Home” page. But this button doesn’t take you to your website’s Home page — it takes you to a dashboard/upsell/overview page.
This breaks the mental model of what “Home” means in the context of editing a website. Clicking it leaves you feeling confused and frustrated when you’re expecting to go to your website’s “Home” page.
It’s a bad design.
Conversely, the Squarespace Fluid Engine Grid is a good design.
The Layout Engine maximizes layout flexibility while keeping the precision of alignment. It’s simple, intuitive, and feels good to use. This flexibility can handle a multitude of design genres and fads, and has stood the test of time (5 years is FOREVER in Websiteland).
With custom code, one way to incorporate good code design for Future You is to add comments to your code.
Custom code is hard enough already, and once you get it right, it can be tempting to stop there. But don’t — think about Future You!
Most likely, once you get code working, you’ll have to come back to it a week, month, or year later. Maybe there is some tiny bug. Maybe the layout is jittery on Safari. Maybe hover effects don’t work on tablets as intended. Or maybe Squarespace changed the header navigation, wreaking havoc on all your custom code 🙃.
Coming back to fix those errors can be a nightmare if you didn’t properly comment your code when you first wrote it. What was Past You thinking?!
Good code design includes well-commented code.
That mindset is what inspired Robo-Will. Robo-Will will write the code you need for a customization or plugin AND it will add proper comments so that you can come back and understand what it’s doing down the road. It’s fast, smart, and dare I say…fun?
Robo-Will is included in the Code Curious membership.
For other custom code resources, check out my Custom CSS search bar and article on Adding Comments to Your Code if you want to go deeper.
Robo-Will
Don’t take my word for it though, see what these people had to say!
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Stay tuned for my next Design Opinion on Friday
Keep building,
Will
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