Note: Miranda July's site made the rounds in web design circles a few months back, and this was my initial response to it, cross-posted from a joint blog I run with my friend Gregory.
No one belongs here more than you is the promotional site for Miranda July's book of short stories by the same title. Typing a description of how the site works feels like it would suck it dry of some of its magic (go see it for yourself, then come back here!), but here I go: rather than the expected structure of a website -- a navigational homepage, some pages about the book and where to buy it, perhaps an "About the Author" page -- it consists of a photographed sequence of the author's scrawlings with a marker.
Now whether the author chose to go this route because she doesn't know how to code HTML, or to be brashly different (I suspect a combination of both), what results is code that doesn't validate, navigation that doesn't give you context of where you are on the site (and doesn't even have a way to go back to the home page), content that is not accessible (all the text is in images without associated alt tags, for starters), copy that isn't search-optimized (search engine spiders can't even crawl it, anyways), and a load time that laughs in the face of the "8-second rule." Even the way the navigation works brings us back to David Siegel's seminal, but now oft-villainized book, Creating Killer Websites, what with its concept of entry "tunnels" to draw visitors in, rather than being upfront with your site structure as Jakob Nielsen and dozens of other usability experts would advocate. The site breaks almost every tried-and-true guideline of over a decade of web design, mantras that I work by and passionately advocate.
Yet, I love this site.
In fact, I went through every page of the site in one sitting on my first visit.
Why do I love this site? Because it works.
In one visit, I built a genuine interest in July's book. I was drawn in both by the site's novel structure and Miranda's delightful sense of humor, which is reflected both in the copy and the twists and turns that the site takes.
That's right -- the site takes twists and turns. Just like a book. In fact, the sequential approach to navigation mirrors the structure of a book, and for good reason: July sells a book of stories by telling a story. How brilliant is that?
The lesson here is not to throw out best practices all willy-nilly when building sites, especially in the arenas of usability and user experience. Rather, in our profession, sometimes it seems very easy to get so caught up in best practices and exciting new technologies and trends that we forget that at its core, a successful website strives to communicate clearly with a real person on the other end. And to achieve its purpose, every aspect of a site must tell that person that "no one belongs here more than you."
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