The clean look

I’ve been sitting in a discussion with Ken Sands, online publisher of the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. Lots of good things to learn about the future of journalism and the things newspapers, reporters, bloggers, et al. have to look forward to.

Anyway, we were talking about craigslist, the free online classifieds service that is “in” hundreds of cities worldwide and is killing the classifieds business of newspapers in every city it covers.

If you go to craigslist, you’ll notice how plain the site is — entirely text. No photos, no video, nothing. Clean to the point of sparseness.

And yet it’s the biggest classified advertising place on the planet.

Google. You’ve heard of it? Another monster site, and another absolutely clean interface. The Drudge Report — same thing. (Granted, there are lots of more-popular news sites that are image heavy.)

Lesson I took home: If you have the information people want, image(s) mean nothing. Clean/plain/Spartan/boring — it’s all OK. Toss out your Web design books that focus on style; substance will kill it every time.