Wednesday, September 15, 2004

What is it with gay homopages? Why are nearly all of them so badly put together? Gay men are meant to be born with near perfect taste and style so why do 99% of queer sites look like they were thrown together by people to whom style was a four letter word?

I have to admit that I don't normally go out on the net to check out other homopages. Usually I check out a few sites and blogs I know and love and leave the rest well alone; however I've been actively following links around the gay internet in pursuit of good sites to add to the links page. The trouble is that there are just so few that I'd even consider linking to.

It seems that one of the biggest problems with most of the sites I've found is that they are full of tacky animated Gifs, are badly laid out with impossible to follow navigation and are so badly put together. Now I realise that most homepages aren't put together by designers but I don't can't see why straight homepages have developed so much during the last couple of years but gay ones haven't.

Creating a good, easy to use homepage (or any website for that matter) is about keeping it nice and simple, choosing and sticking to a colour scheme and creating a way of navigating around the site without the user getting lost all the time. It's not about seeing how many different flashing pride logos you can cram onto one page or how many nifty javascript effects you can run at one time.

Of course there are some great homopages out there. UK homopages such as IainGilfillan.net and NeilsObsessions.com are truly wonderful spaces that anyone would be proud to call their own. It's just a shame most of the others really let the side down.

Posted by Antz at 11:08 PM | Permalink | | |

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