By Allan Maurer

When the aptly named Marshall Brain started HowStuffWorks as a hobby in 1998, “It was in those early days, one of the simplest and most conventionally coded sites you could imagine,” he says. “It became extremely popular and won a lot of awards in that form.”

Brain, who retired from HowStuffWorks this past summer, is one of many digital media and marketing thought-leaders doing presentations at the upcoming Internet Summit at the Raleigh, NC Convention Center Nov. 15-16.

Brain will talk about when a company needs to build a “high touch site that needs to be gorgeous and full of magic features and Web 2.0 stuff or whatever the buzz word of day is,” or “when you can have a web site that’s neutral or downright ugly be one of the top sites in the world.”

Brain points out that a lot of web sites have been incredibly successful by ignoring all the fancy bells and whistles stuff and being simple.

The Drudge Report, for instance, still users the typewriter font Currier and resembles a typed newsletter with some photographs. Craig’s List took the classified ad business away from newspapers with a look that is decidedly basic.

On the other hand, sometimes it appearances and all those fashionable bells and whistles do matter. “It depends on who you perceive your audience to be,” Brain says.

Two types of Web users

“There are two types of users at each end of a spectrum who come to web sites,” he says. One type, a group Brain says include him, are people who tend to be do-it-yourselfers, engineers, frugal people, those who tend not to be sensitive to fashion, style and the current trends.

The other type buys clothes with fashion labels, cares about the brand of beer they drink, and is conscious of and sensitive to matters of style and fashion. “If you’re dealing with an audience on that end of the spectrum, they care about what your interface looks like and it’s worth your while to follow the latest trends.”

In his world, Brain says, “Content matters much more than style. But there are people who wouldn’t go to Craig’s List because of the way it looks.”

Deployment issues can add to expense

The question is important because investing time and money in design and style “can get expensive, especially doing some of the fancier stuff.”

Sites with a lot of bells and whistles need developers who can hand the technical deployment issues around the huge number of devices, operating systems and browsers. “If you go hyper simple,” Brain notes, “it’s happy in Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, mobile. The fancier you make it, the more you have to worry about deployment.”

For instance, “A lot of people who went with flashy interfaces got burned by the popularity of the iPad, which can’t display Flash,” he notes.

Brain has doubts that Flash will survive except as a legacy technology due to the costs invovled, the penetration of the iPad and the fact that browsers are all trying to replace Flash with native functionality. “I think the three together will be the end of Flash,” he says.

Good riddance, we say.

So how do you decide which audience you are appealing to?

One way is to do A-B testing. Do both a simple site and one that’s fancier. “There are tools that will do that for you,” Brain notes.

At the Internet Summit, Brain plans to “Walk people through examples to help them understand the audience they’re dealing with so they can decide if they need to invest the time and expense in design and style or can deliver their content in a straight-forward way.”

Will teach entrepreneurship course at NC State

Brain says that now that he has left How Stuff Works, he’s working on “A couple of books and gestating a couple of business ideas.”

He’s also doing a good bit of mentoring and will be teaching a class in entrepreneurship at North Carolina State University in the spring 2012 semester.

One book he’s working on will deal with the way children accidentally die and how to prevent that in the home. The other, is about how the U.S. tax systems affects society in the United States.

“I’m also spending a lot more time with my four kids and enjoying that,” he says.

 

 

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Tags: fashion vs. simplicity in web design, Internet Summit, keeping web site costs down, Marshall Brain, NC State, web site bells and whistles, web site deployment issues, when does a web site need to be fancy? when can you keep a web site simple, who is the audience for your web site?