Creating a corporate website can be a tedious task but a very important one for marketing a business. For those of us that are new at the task I found an article in BusinessWeek to help guide us along. It is the Ten Commandments of web design and it was created from survey results taken from Web design gurus:
1. Thou salt not abuse flash – Excessive animations confuse usability and bog down uesers’ Web browsers.
2. Thou shalt not hide content – researchers say pop ups and full page ads that obscure content hurt functionality and test a reader’s willingness to revisit.
3. Thou shalt not clutter -Sites that lack a coherent structure make it impossible to wade through information.
4. thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections - Creating glassy reflections under photos of products had become a cliche.
5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels – Names like Flickr, Smibs, and Meebo are destined to sound dated.
6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography – Plain text has become cutting edge Web design.
7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences – Creating Web sites that can capture and hold users’ attention is what matters most
8. Thou shalt be social – Designers are now filtering those same elements into diverse sites, from smart advertising to online office productivity.
9. thou shalt embrace proven technologies – Sites that can incorporate these elements into their design will connect with users in a meaningful way by providing functionality and an interface with withich they’re already familiar.
10. Thou shalt make content king – Beautiful can’t make up for empty.
These are the must follow rules top online designers live by in 2008. For a full list of the contributors you can visit the BusinessWeek site.
Tags: technology, web design, websites
October 14, 2008 at 2:03 pm
Nice article, however I hope you guys realize there’s no such thing as commandments with web design, each web designer has his own ways.