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Are there 10 Commandments of Web Design?

Andre Charland
July 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

I always find it interesting when the web design practice gets a little more attention from the broader business industry. And that's exactly what BusinessWeek has done, they've interviewed a group of web design luminaries to come up with a list of the top 10 rules web designers should follow. They've also compiled a slideshow of best of the web which is composed of 25 top picks from the design gurus they interviewed.

Of course the author is not a web guru so they got a couple things wrong for example:

"Many of their promised game-changing technologies—Jini, DHTML, and countless others—never panned out"

Oops, maybe they didn't get the memo about Ajax;-) Since in fact it's defacto technology for richer web apps and sites today.

I'll let you go through the list yourselft, but here are the 3 rules that I believe we can all agree on. I think the others are good but the context of their application matters too much to be so called "commandments".

2. Thou shalt not hide content.
Advertisements may be necessary for a site's continued existence, but usability researchers say pop-ups and full-page ads that obscure content hurt functionality—and test a reader's willingness to revisit. Elective banners—that expand or play audio when a user clicks on them—are much less intrusive.

3. Thou shalt not clutter.

The Web may be the greatest archive of all time, but sites that lack a coherent structure make it impossible to wade through information. Amazon.com (AMZN) and others put their sites' information hierarchy at the top of their list of design priorities.

10. Thou shalt make content king.

Though the slogan is old, it still stands. Aesthetic design can only go so far in making a site successful. Beautiful can't make up for empty.

I think it would be hard to make a case against designing apps that have great content, have a clean layout and present content in an accessible way. Some of their other rules are more guidelines such as "Thou shalt not abuse Flash", well which technology should you abuse? "Thou Shalt be Social" is a bit much since not every site or web app on the web should or could be social.

What are your rules for design? Or do you even have any? I think there's a school of thought that says you have to treat every situation individually drawing on best practices rather that black and white rules.

Thanks to Rob for sending this article my way.

comments: 3

Comments

3 Comments

neil said:

I thought the 10 commandments of web design were very useful steps. If everyone followed them there'd be a lot more quality website on the internet thats for sure! Also, i dont think that making content king neccessarily means sacrificing design

July 11, 2008 1:14 PM

Abhijeet said:

Andre, apart from the three you mentioned - can others be called commandments is question in my mind? I would like to listen more on this.

And yes, I found this interesting "Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels."

July 13, 2008 7:31 AM

Travis said:

Here are my thoughts:

1. I have been designing in Flash since MX and I have always said this. Any good thing can be abused and Flash had a bad rep for a while because of the abuse. Many a cool interactive thing can be done in Flash, especially with the upcoming Flash 10, but for a site intended to provide information it can be overkill.

2. I agree with this but sadly the people who make the decisions don't always understand this. Often if they see one out of a 100 respond to the popup then that is good enough for them. But convincing them that 50 of that 100 may never come back is harder.

3. Agreed.

4. It's a fad. It'll go away on its own.

5. I don't understand what naming a company has to do with web design myself. For most web designers this isn't even an issue.

6. Typography is a good thing. But considering we're severely limited by the number of fonts we "think" visitors "might" have this is rather difficult to achieve. If only we had a proper way to share the necessary fonts like an image without the typesetters freaking out over it.

7. Agreed.

8. Not everything needs to be social. Supporting a social portal on a website can be too expensive for a company.

9. Wikipedia, YouTube and Facebook are not technologies. They are websites that properly use new technologies. Plus you have to be careful with integrating with social sites as large groups of people treat them as fads moving from the old to the latest release in mass migrations on a moment's notice. You'll have to constantly keep up with the latest trends to maximize the potential.

10. This is so obvious that it's sad it has to be constantly repeated for people to get it.

For a list of 10 Commandments for Web Design I have to say I'm rather disappointed with it. It seems more like a list of 10 Commandments for Creating Your Own Web2.0 Company than anything to do with actual web design. And considering the source it makes sense it would come off that way.

Where's the Commandment to follow web standards? Browser checking? Usability testing? Write clean code so that others can easily maintain it? Don't have an over-reliance on new technologies? Use of progressive enhancements?

There are a large number of things that should be on a list for web design that this list doesn't even begin to cover. As one of their comments state, are we now taking design advice from a business magazine?

July 14, 2008 6:38 AM

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