Minimalism

I'm finding, as the web evolves, that I abhor clutter on a website. It's actually part of what decides if I keep using a site's services or if I go elsewhere. Examples:

• CNN.com won out over MSNBC.com when the latter changed their layout and began using those irritating 'mouseover expanding' menus.
• MySpace lost hands-down before I even started using Facebook.
• I can't stand Google's homepage if I log in and add widgets - it's plain, or not at all. (Honestly, though, for most of what I go to the web to find out, I just go to Wikipedia. I use Google for entirely different things than I use Wikipedia, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

AdBlock Plus and Flashblock are, after NoScript, my most favored and beloved of addons. (Sure, Zotero is fantastic, but not for making my every day web browsing better.)

I can't bring myself to get behind Flash- and/or image-heavy web design. Give me text, darn it. I'm a heavy user of 'search as you type' in Firefox - I want to be able to find what I'm looking for by typing it as I'm thinking it. And the accessibility issues? Argh.

But, yeah. I tend to prefer clean, crisp designs. No excessive Flash; organizationally tidy; colors are aesthetically pleasing and facilitate reading. If your site is too distracting to use, I'm giong to go find something with approximately equivalent content that I find either easier to use or less hectic to dig through.

I would expect it shows in the themes I choose for blogs and the design of my own sites.