Sites made of awesomesauce: acko.net

Have you guys checked out Steven Wittens acko.net? It’s totes awesome. Over the weekend as links to it sprung up on twitter there were a bunch of “holy crap thats amazing“‘s and a lot of “Boooo that’s unusable rabble rabble rabble”s. Jeff Croft took a look at the latter and covers the spirit of experimentation honestly.

Both the site and Jeff’s post are worth taking a looking at. Prior to reading Jeff’s piece, I had a conversation about how I thought it was a great interface. Users are directed exactly to where the site owner wants them to go. My eyes instantly go to the banner and I learn a little bit about what I’m looking at. I assume many users visited the site from Twitter without knowing much about Wittens. Right away we know this is a “Hacker, Design and Math” site. The recent posts are in the background, so still completely accessible and easy to move to with a scroll.

The audience of this site is most likely pretty web savvy so I don’t see many users being confused. A little laggy in Chrome? Maybe, but who notices when you are being dumbfounded by how rad it is! I wonder if the people Jeff talks about are complaining about other distinct headers and unique interactions. For instance, I enjoy the use of giant hero images such as the one on The Great Discontent and feel it fits the content and audience, even though visitors might have to “wait” to get to the content by scrolling. People hate on one page scroll sites lately and while I could certainly look up “Hydraulic Fracturing” (zzzzz) I’d rather learn about it on http://dangersoffracking.com/. Some I’m sure will hate that site and prefer a wikipedia option, but I think its pretty nifty.

So as Jeff said, cheers to those of you that keep making the radness on the nerd.