Something that has come up for me during the design process for my portfolio site is the issue of design versus usability. I have had to make a decision based on this a number of times so far.

My initial idea for the website was to take the JavaScript slider that I previously made, and apply it to the entire site. The ‘pages’ would then be laid out horizontally across the browser, and the navigation bar would scroll across them. I liked this idea as it would be something different and catch the attention of those using it. However, I have since come to the conclusion that this really isn’t the best idea for the site.

For one thing, the scrolling action would be done utilising JavaScript, rendering the page somewhat unusable to those that, for whatever reason, have disabled JavaScript in their browser. This is not good for getting the page to the widest audience possible.

Another problem with this side-scrolling page design would be that it would be impossible to link someone to a specific page of the site (for example, mysite.com/mywork). This is because it would all be one page, and the scrolling to different sections would be done using JavaScript functions attached to the navigation bar, rather than just hyperlinking to a different resource.

For these reasons I have decided not to pursue this design. I may however still go with a single page design, but a more traditional vertical scrolling one. I may also opt for a multi-page site.