Fashion Over Fit

First and foremost, thanks for reading my first class blog installment. So far our Web Publication & Design class seems like it will be a lot of fun, which makes for a great learning environment.

Let me begin by sharing a very short lesson I learned from my wife, a podiatrist, that quickly sums up her approach to long lasting foot health.

"Fit before fashion."

In her profession, fit over fashion primarily means practicality and comfort wins over aesthetics.

Since becoming a Rochester-based podiatrist several years ago, she's driven home the message that walking and running in comfortable shoes is the key to good long term foot health. Just because the highest stilettos look flashy and stylish or those expensive running shoes in Nike's latest ad campaign look awesome, doesn't mean they're right for you. If they make your feet hurt, what are they truly worth?

She does understand, however, that compromise is the key. She works hard to ensure that her patients (and our family) wear shoes that check off both the fit and the fashion portions of her podiatric checklist. Her goal is to make sure those she advises don't have to sacrifice fashion if she can establish the proper fit.

You have to achieve both fit and fashion in order for the customer and distributor to be happy. I feel the same about web design. You have to grab the reader with fashion (design) then keep them there with the fit (the content.)

Take mine and my partner's website UTRMinors.com for example.

Using Wordpress, it's clean, basic design is practical. It possesses the fundamental elements we discussed in class last Thursday when comparing newspaper and tabloids to well designed websites: A banner, headlines, easy to find links, a side-bar listing recently published stories, recent Twitter posts and repetitive formatting. All of this makes our daily posts easy to follow.

For the hardcore saber metric enthusiast, the willingness to look past the vanilla aesthetic makes the site work. That's based solely on the fact, however, that my partner and I have created a one-of-a-kind stat service for our readers. But, I confess. What you see isn't nearly enough to immediately grab and engage the casual baseball audience unless you've been referred to the site based on the content alone.

We are, in essence, a pair of Birkenstocks. We have perfect fit, but not enough fashion.

When it's all said and done, I'd love our website design to closely resemble BaseballAmerica.com.

Aside from the fact that their content is second to none in the industry, it's soft color texture, story alignment and proximity of pictures versus text forces the reader to stay on the page. The side bar links are not overbearing and their use of white space provides the perfect amount of separation to where the reader does not get instantaneously bored.