But, that isn’t what I’m actually writing about. Its easy enough to see that I’ve changed the site, its far more interesting to talk about why I’ve changed it. Or rather, why I’ve felt so compelled to change it as many times as I have. Alright, so I probably haven’t been as design-changing-happy as some people on the good old Internet are, but that’s somewhat of the point. People like to change things up every now and then. I find that I like to change the looks of an awful lot of things. Heck, half the reason I prefer Linux over any other platform is the sheer ability to change how it looks and functions. I routinely change Windows Manager, wallpaper, menu systems, programs, panels, themes, and far more. A little bit of change, and the ability to make that change, is important to me.

Part of me wants to say that this is true for many people. Individuality tends to be rather important to people. Yet, at the same time, I know an awful lot of people have a desktop displaying a blue sky and a grassy hill, with a blue taskbar running along the bottom of their screen, with a green button stating “Start”.

Is it just that I’m weird, then? Well, alright, that’s a given, but do people not care that much about how their computer looks? How about how a website looks? Do they care about how much flexibility they are given within a program? Does the ability to tweak the visual look matter? Does the ability to tweak functionality matter?

Firefox is a huge success partly because it offers a huge array of extensions. At the same time, Firefox is also a huge success because its a really lightweight browser that just gets the job done well, and there’s plenty of people out there who never install a single plug-in.

There are, of course, plenty of examples where the ability to customize a program or a website has been put to greater use by the users. I would be curious to know what the percentage of MySpace pages are not using a default theme, compared to those that are. In a way, I suppose you could also state that any time someone partakes in user content generation, or even so much as just adding some text to a website is a form of customization. The web, after all, offers people a huge amount of ways to share information and communicate – and also to stand out as individuals. It seems intuitive that the ability to heavily customize something is a nice feature.

Of course, the difference between, say, a Windows Desktop and Firefox, compared to something like MySpace, is fairly significant. After all, one of the perks of a social networking site is that you can put yourself out there as an individual, as well as making connections with your friends and gaining new ones. Then again, Facebook allows users much less visual customization than MySpace – but it also allows people to customize its functionality with the addition of applications, similar, in some respects, to things like Firefox.

I know my mind would default to saying a user should be given plenty of (easy to use) options to customize program, but should they at all? Should a program being developed for a general audience worry about stuff like that, and to what degree? Is visual customization important? Functional? Does it matter if the program is something public or not?