Earlier, I ran into this little nugget from a "web design" site. I'm convinced it's some kind of parody, because not only is the advice fucking stupid, but the site itself looks like it was put together by Tim Berners-Lee himself... When he was a freshman.
The main gist of the article is that a site's logo should not link to the homepage. Now, as we all know, yes it bloody well should! But the counterargument by Jesper Tverskov (the brainiac behind the site) essentially amounts to "Just because everyone else does it, doesn't mean I should."
Funny enough, Jester - uh, sorry, Jesper - pretty much refutes his own argument in the first paragraph. He cites another article written by some other moron saying that only one third of users ever click on the logo. Firstly, the cited article was written in 2001 and we all know that nothing ever really changes on the Web, right? Furthermore, is adding a link in your logo really that much of an effort that you're willing to risk scaring off one third of your userbase because your site doesn't navigate the way they expect it to?
I refuse to believe the argument from design. This is not a goddamn design issue, it's a navigation issue.
Another point he raises is that redundant links to the homepage can be a nightmare for blind people using screen readers. If by "nightmare" he means "minor annoyance," I agree. However, and don't get me wrong here, I respect the disabled (or differently-abled, whatever), but I'm not going to cripple my site (sorry) for the vast majority of my users just to shave one second off of the browsing time of the 0.003% of visitors who use screen reading software.
After being wowed by the spectacular design of my blog, you may be truly shocked to learn that I'm not a designer. No, I'm not kidding; I'm just a regular user like you. Though, wouldn't that make me a good authority on web design, seeing as I know exactly what most people would want from a website, since I am one of those people?
Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and Jesper's right. Even so, the most obvious difference between us seems to be that I actually want people to come to my site.
Jesper makes a couple of pretty good points here and there, but I'm not going to cover them because that won't be snarky, and that's the entire point of this post.
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