Websites and the Science of Happiness
Wed, 09 Apr 2008
The designers of this website are happiness merchants. Ok sure, they don’t call themselves “happiness merchants”, it’s not on their business cards, but that is indeed their primary line of work.
Happiness is the difference between feeling good (e.g. eating chocolate), and doing good (e.g. holding the door open for a stranger). It’s the doing good that truly makes us happy, not personal gratification. Equally important, happiness comes from learning and achieving, especially when the learning comes with a bit of a struggle. And that’s where Jon and Jon come in.
The relationship between client and web designer is often co-dependent. Web developers want a reliable long-term client who provides a revenue stream, and the client needs the developer to provide constant support, regular content upload, and to perform all the little maintenance tweaks a fresh site demands. Once the fun is over (the design and launch stages), drudgery and even resentment can set in. (“Why hasn’t she sent me content?” or “Why hasn’t he uploaded my content yet?!”) This site breaks the co-dependency and offers freedom in its place. And that’s freedom for both the designers and the client.
Jon Tan and Jon Gibbins created this website on the concept of mutual happiness. They didn’t hold back knowledge. They taught me the basic mechanics so I can be self-sufficient. It’s a bit like open source sharing. They built a site that is beautiful and timely but dead easy for me to tinker with and refresh as often as I want. Once I make a change the longest I wait for the site to refresh is 24 hours. And some changes will happen even faster. They made me learn a bit of HTML code. I’m at the beginning of my learning curve but I’m already excited to see the results of basic code upload. It’s like that proverb. Rather than give me a fish, Jon and Jon have taught me to fish. And that makes me very happy indeed.
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