Member-only story
Build better websites: A web design rant after Hurricane Helene
This week, the east coast of the United States was hit by hurricane Helene. For many places, including East-Tennessee, the flooding caused biblical destruction. Communities in my region have experienced the worst natural disaster in recorded history. Cars, homes, cities, lives, simply swept away.
Like millions of others in Florida, Georgia, the Carolina’s, and Virginia, I continuously went to the internet to find the most up-to-date information about the storm.
In our area, we needed to know really important information like, “Has the Nolichucky Dam failed yet?” or “When will our town run out of drinking water?” and in theory, the internet is the best tool to provide that real-time information and photos during crises (assuming your internet is still working). Wasn’t that the whole promise of technologies like 5G and Starlink?
Naturally, local and national news outlets were covering this situation.
But as it turns out, those websites were borderline useless when we needed them most simply because of one thing: bad web design. It’s a problem that is by no means exclusive to news outlets. It’s simply that in this case, better web design could save lives.
Given the actual human-safety of this situation, I think it’s high time we rethink…
