4. Design principles

Smallsite Design is not trying to take over the world by trying to be all things to all possible clients. Rather, it is for those wanting to fully manage their own site for visitors who like to read.

Thus, the facilities are limited to only those that such people actually require, with no complicating plugins nor future expandability included. That doesn't mean that another product cannot be used with Smallsite Design, but just not in a way that creates direct dependencies upon them. For example, Disqus can provide embedded comments for articles, which is not allowed by Smallsite Design, but you can also just have a link at the bottom of your page to your own dedicated comments page on their site.

Up until recent years, much web technology has been based upon defining how each element on the page looks. The latest standards shifted focus to the meaning of those elements, known as semantics.

Pages used to be designed around headings, paragraphs, images and other individual elements. If structure more than that was wanted, there were general purpose container elements to do that, and they were used, a lot, but they didn't provide a standard way of determining what parts of a page were related to others by content.

The latest incarnation of the basic page standard, HTML5, introduced specific semantic containing elements, like article, header, section, aside and others, making it a lot easier to identify related content. These allow programs, such as Smallsite Design, to present and edit pages by their content structure, which makes more sense to a writer.

The big driver for the change was that the huge amount of information available on the web was just getting too hard for search engines to make sense of. While they can gain a lot of information by just scanning the text of a page, a semantic structure helps to differentiate the relative importance of words by where in the structure of an article they occur. That means that a search engine's algorithms have a much deeper set of parameters with which to determine how relevant a page is to a search.

Such a structure means that Smallsite Design can take care of a lot of design elements automatically, like that when you add a section or subsection, the associated navigation bar entries are automatically created.

With most sites trying their best to reap every bit of personal infomation out of every one of their client's visits, the Smallsite Design product takes the opposite tack.

As a basic principle, the product doesn't request information of visitors. However, that is just about the information that the client is being explicitly asked for. During the course of a visit to most sites, there is a lot more being collected.

The only information Smallsite Design collects about a visit is that after 30 seconds (2-3 paragraphs) on an article page, the time, article identifier and locale are sent back to the site to indicate that at least part of the page has been read. This is to produce a list of read pages by the most popular and locale; the most useful statistics. This facility is off by default. Smallsite Design allows outbound links, but with them no data leaks out, as no referrer information is provided to the target site. Images are only sourced from your site, so no data is ever leaked by viewing them.

However, depending upon who hosts your site, site visitor statistics packages provided with cPanel will probably be on by default, and perhaps with no ability to switch them off, though reputable site hosters should allow that.

Many sites have no problem handing over their visitors' browsing information in return for ad revenue. In contrast, Smallsite Design is for those who want to build a quality body of knowledge, with the intention that people will place their trust in it. That trust is lost if personal infomation is being leaked to third-party sites.

A possible urban myth is that a key factor in the failed invasion of Russia by the Germans in 1941 was that their precisely designed tanks seized up in the winter, unlike the more loose Russian ones.

The first relies on tight coupling between components, which enables susceptability to being broken if any of them change in their characteristics in future. The early web soon learnt that some heroic means were needed to get sites to be predictable, so Dreamweaver became a popular tool to lock down the look of sites, but it was predicated on people having fixed size screens.

Move forward a couple of decades and we now have a myriad of screens sizes, for which fixed layouts just look clunky. Enter fluid design, where page elements dynamically adapt their size and position for best situational placement. Such an approach is essential for using a site across many devices.

Smallsite Design takes fluid design to its core, so that it adapts to screen size and orientation in reasonable ways, but which also maintain usefulness for situations like the on-screen keyboard obsuring much of the content.

Basically, there is none. Que? Because social media sites are mostly about short-term, light-weight interaction, which is fine much of the time, but not when you want to engage more deeply.

Smallsite Design sites are envisaged as your office or home site, where you invite people to come after engaging them in the streets of social media, or the footpath signs of search engine entries, free of all the distractions of others. With that in mind, and that most social media sites are engaged in extremely high levels of user tracking, the Smallsite Design ethos is to not have any of your visitors being tracked by others. Therefore, the official buttons and scripts that these sites want you to embed on yours are not allowed.

The main principle here is that those sites are not the ultimate target for your visitors as they would like them to be, but that your site becomes the valued target for your followers on those sites. You provide links on them to your site, making yours the end-point, not theirs! Of course, you can link back to them, but only with a normal link without referrer information, so unable to be tracked by them.

Smallsite design allows you to create all the content for your site, rather than being forced to live with their latest agendas, experiments, and advertising co-habitors, which certainly are not in your best interest if you want put out a clear message to the world. Social media sites want you to be in their world, on their terms only, but they can be useful, so it is finding the right balance between their rich interaction and distractions, and the stability and determined presence of your own site.

These refer to being able to cater for different languages and express numbers and dates in them.

Smallsite Design is built from the ground up to use Unicode, which is designed to cater for all languages on earth. However, there are many historical ways the character sets of different languages can be represented. Mismatches between the character set used on a page and what the browser expects can result in foreign language or garbage characters appearing. Smallsite Design exclusively uses UTF-8, which is the most universal way to present Unicode text.

Smallsite Design caters for versions of a site in multiple languages, while allowing fallthrough for locales/languages for which an article has not been written. While auto-translations offered by Google and other search engines are improving all the time, they don't cater for localisations that may be idiomatic to your target audiences, such as for the scenary, illustrations, or examples used. Each page for which multiple locales are offered includes navigation between the locales at the bottom of the page.

Internally, Smallsite Design uses the UTC international time reference, to which all timezones refer, and which ensures that there are none of the out-of-sequence timestamps for article versions which may result if a timezone is used when switching back and forth to daylight-saving time. UTC is sometime erroneously referred to as GMT, which is actually the non-summer timezone for the UK.

Website design is largely seen as a graphic designers job, but many typographical elements chosen by them do not help readers understanding.

Typography is about how the elements of a page are laid out and the presentational characteristics of those elements. Graphics designers want to make pages pictorially appealing, but does focusing upon that help readers' comprehension of what is being presented? That is, is the content actually being successful at communication, or are the design choices getting in the way of that? Most of the web uses ragged-right sans-serif for body text, so let's see what Colin Wheildon's research showed about those two choices.

What these statistics reveal is that the two major typographical choices made by most web designers for the body text of pages severely limits their comprehension by the great majority of those reading them. Such adverse effects means that readers have to use extra effort to concentrate on reading, and so are more likely to abandon reading a page unless they are really interested. Perhaps this is a why people are preferring less text and more videos and pictures, or reading books, or using their Kindles which still default to these settings. However, short sans-serif headings are tolerated.

Note that the tests were conducted with English speakers and hence used to left-to-right text. Presumably, the statistics for ragged-left and ragged-right for readers of Arabic and other right-to-left scripts would be reversed. For those scripts that don't tend to be rendered with serifs, the second table of statistics is probably not relevant.

In the early days of the web, the resolution of displays were a lot lower than they are now, making the ticks on serif fonts hard to render. The same lack of resolution made micro-spacing difficult for properly rendering justified text. However, most people use their phones to view the web, and those are typically into the 100s of pixels per inch, making serif fonts and justification easily and cleanly rendered, yet the two basic settings haven't changed. While many designers stand by these choices, no one is presenting evidence that Colin's statistics don't apply to the web.

For some people, whose visual acuity or neurology – such as autism – is different to most, reading justified text is difficult because the extra spacing makes the sentences fall apart. Some advocates, including the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) say to just make everything ragged right, but the statistics show that such a choice severely affects most readers. This is making a zero-sum choice where catering to a minority severely affects the majority. After all, no one is claiming that everyone must use long ramps rather than stairs.

Most people exhibit a bias in how they process information, and that still needs to be accommodated for, rather than assuming that they are readily able to adapt to the biases of another group, which is what minority groups were expected to do in the past. Incorporating the flexibility to cater for each individual 's biases would make each site unworkable, but there are some clear, but distinct, perceptual biases that can simplify the choices that site visitors make so that they can still use a site without substantive issues.

Accordingly, Smallsite Design provides a checkbox on every page to toggle accessibility mode to cater for those with visual difficulties, which is what WCAG used to suggest. Of course, which end is rendered as ragged is locale-dependent. The accessibility also grey the page background, increases line-spacing, underlines links and turns off automatic hyphenation, all of which people with autism or some visual difficulties may also have problems with.

As a suggestion to those who really don't like justified text enough to rant on their blogs about it, given that the majority of people seem to prefer justified, difficulty with justified text, especially the extra-large spaces that can occur occasionally on some lines, and other common typographical elements, may indicate a neurological condition like autism. Getting assessed may provide some insight into why such reactions are occurring. Autism is a naturally-occurring neurological variation often associated with novel creative thinking.

Some design choices relate to the technology and how it's used to deliver the site.

Some third-party testing results that can be expected for a Smallsite Design site.

The Qualys SSL Report security rating for this site: A+.
Note that most tech companies, banks and e-commerce sites don't get A+.

The Security Header's scan rating for this site: A+
Note that most tech companies, banks and e-commerce sites don't get A+.

This is for mobile use in Australia from a server in Michigan USA. For comparison, the figures for Google's sparse home page are 73, 71, 96 and 85. The home pages for most tech companies, banks and e-commerce sites are similar or worse than Google's. In particular, their performance figures are generally much worse than for SEO, which means they favour attracting visitors to their site just to sacrifice their time.

What is surprising is that for all their expertise and technology resources, most large companies find it difficult to get the consistency across all these measurement sites that Smallsite Design does. That is a sad inditement of those companies and their priorities.

Note that internet network conditions can occasionally cause delays in accessing pages, especially from a country outside where the site's server is, so that testing may need to be done at multiple times to see the performance that can generally be expected. Testing sites change their ratings criteria over time to reflect changing user and security expectations, but these ratings were typical as at early 2023.