Pere-Lachaise

The Parisian cemetery Père-Lachaise has a truly excellent website, organised as a virtual walking tour. It's about the best piece of web design I've ever seen: clean and quiet appearance, well organised and laid out, easy to navigate, intuitive to use.

I'll give you one clue to get you started. The site opens (once you've chosen a language) with a large-scale map, with black crosses and white nodes where paths meet. Superimposed on the map is a view of the entrance to the cemetery, photoshopped onto the pavement is a red disk with a white arrow pointing inwards. Click on the red disk, let the new photo load. Now move the cursor towards one of the white arrows beside the photo, and let it scroll a little. Look back at the map: Do you know where you are and in which direction you're facing?

Good design makes difficult things seem obvious. Good design is like the assisting nurse in an operating room, standing out of the way with the tools you need at hand. Bad design is like the ringmaster of a circus, shouting "look here! look there! look at me!" but doing nothing. We are bears of very little brain, we get distracted by flashing lights and ringing bells and forget that the lights and bells were supposed to be leading us to the site's content.

A damn fine website. Dix points sur dix for the designers.

The content here is the tombs and headstones of some very famous and significant people. Many of these are magnificent works of art in themselves (the website has one significant failing: it is a "black box", there is no way for me to give you a link to any particular tomb). One might quibble about the valuations implicit in the commentary: much as I admire Jim Morrison, I doubt that he is worth six times as many words as Marcel Proust.

Père-Lachaise is an oasis of calm in the dusty chaos of Paris, cool and shady paths bordered by flowers and old trees. Spend half a day there, next time you are in Paris: you'll enjoy it.