I Am Still Alive

Ok, at best, I am ambivalent about the premise from which CommandShift3 is built (Hot or Not for websites, with no attention paid to content), but I’d reserve the same gripes for the whole Hot or Not idea if not for the fact that nobody really makes the mistake to think that Hot or Not actually provides any kind of new or useful perspective on much of anything (it’s a pageview generating machine).

That being said, Lovetastic, a gay personals site I worked on this year for Norbauer Partners, has been getting really positive marks at CommandShift3. Right now, it is rated second overall among sites tagged dating and third among sites tagged networking (it’s likely that “social networking” was split into two tags for some reason; but Lovetastic is in 12th for “social” sites). It has “won” 76% of its “battles” (screenshots of two sites are compared and voted on).

So what does this all tell us. Pretty much nothing. I am glad folks are responding well to the design at first glance, but a site’s real success (particularly for social web apps) depends on how people come to inhabit that site’s functional space—aesthetics obviously inform this, but information architecture, usability, content, the quality of the community and myriad other elements play just as important a role. The design should facilitate all these other (sometimes nuanced) attributes and I doubt that that comes across on CommandShift3; reducing complex judgements to binary choices based on incomplete information seems to work in American politics but these kind of results shouldn’t be taken as remotely authoritative in a field as important as web design.

Anyhow. It’s worth noting that Lovetastic’s mission relates to this fairly directly.