• This is an accumulation of thoughts about the web and web professionals. None of the thoughts below originated from my head. I just found them interesting.

-Rich

This is from one of Doc Searls’ blog postings:

I didn’t link to The Doors’ site because it’s full of Flash and other crap that is not only at stylistic variance from the spare and artful nature of The Doors’ work, but likely to either annoy you or crash something. (My Linux box can’t see or hear the Flash stuff, my Windows box wants to download all kinds of stuff and then fails with it anyway, and my Mac just flat-out crashes on it. I don’t recall any other site recently that actually brings down a computer. But that’s what The Doors site did in this case.)

link

That was a perfect example.

From: Businessweek article on the 10 commandments of web design.

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.

Adobe’s (ADBE) popular Web animation technology powers everything from the much-vaunted Nike (NKE) Plus Web site for running diehards to many humdrum banner advertisements. But the technology can easily be abused—excessive, extemporaneous animations confuse usability and bog down users’ Web browsers.

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.

4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.

Apple (AAPL) often sets the standard for slick and cool—in all forms of design. But some experts say the company’s habit of creating glassy reflections under photos of its products has been far too commonly copied, turning the style element into a cliché.

5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.

The Web has brought with it a strange nomenclature that’s only got weirder over time. Hip, smart Web sites have been named either with a superfluous number of vowels or strategically deleted ones. Cases in point: Flickr, Smibs, and Meebo. These names are memorable but destined to sound dated.

6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.

Designers say that despite the increase in broadband penetration, plain text has gotten a second wind in cutting-edge Web design. Mainstream sites such as Craigslist have led the way, while designer-oriented sites such as Coudal Partners and John Gruber’s popular Daring Fireball blog represent the cutting edge.

7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.

Merely looking good doesn’t cut it anymore. Sites like Facebook and YouTube draw in users with compelling content and functionality. Creating Web sites that can capture and hold users’ attention is what matters most.

8. Thou shalt be social.

Web 2.0 is everywhere. MySpace (NWS) and similar sites only launched the trend of having users communicate and interact—sometimes obsessively—on browser-based sites. Designers are now filtering those same elements into diverse sites, from smart advertising to online office productivity.

9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.

Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, and their cohorts have become a part of daily life. Sites that can incorporate these elements into their design will connect with users in a meaningful way by providing functionality and an interface with which they’re already familiar.

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.

This means plan out what the site is supposed to *do* first. Map out the features and data structures before you even attempt to think about what it will look like. Visual design may seem important given that the web is primarily a visual medium, but it’s actually quite incidental. Once the function is complete, changing the form can be a trivial task.

Think about it this way: if you want to build a new house, you don’t call up an interior designer first; you call an architect.

You tell the architect how many floors, how many bedrooms, how many bathrooms, how high the ceilings are, what kitchen layout.

Once all that is worked out, then you build the house.

Then you call the interior designer.

Most websites are done like the following:

Interior designer makes some sketches, focusing around some specific objects (vase, table, etc).

Architect is told, “Build the house in these sketches.”

Architect scratches his head, knowing he doesn’t have all the info he needs to do his job. Architect starts asking questions that the home owner never even thought about. Home owner gets frustrated that the architect can’t just do his job. Architect get frustrated that he can’t get the information he needs to do his job. Eventually, a lousy house gets built, and the home owner loves it because it looks like the sketches… never mind that the roof leaks and there’s no electricity because the architect got tired of making assumptions.

Obviously, this would never happen in the real world, because there are things like building codes, and most people understand what a house is.

• Understand what you want
• It costs more and takes longer than you think
• A Web site has several pieces. Don’t cut corners.
• Balance glitz and guts
• If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
• Avoid bit decay: the site needs maintenance
• Treat the Web team as professionals

Most people in the Web industry are clueless. It may sound harsh, but I really think that’s the sad truth. The majority of Web workers out there should either update their skills to what is required in the 21st century or find something else to do.

You only get what you pay for. If you get something cheap, there is always a catch. The lowest bidder is the lowest bidder for a reason. Remember that.

Don’t start your project with buying a CMS. So many organisations walk into this trap, especially in the public sector. A municipality buys a cheap CMS that looks good to them, then goes looking for someone to implement a website on top of it. The end result is very often both inflexible, inaccessible, and dull looking.

“Not everyone uses [Microsoft Internet Explorer], is 20 [years old] and has 20/20 vision. Visitors may be color blind, blind, dyslexic, epileptic, have cognitive problems, poor reading skills, poor concetration. They may use IE, Firefox, Opera, Kongueror, Safari… screen readers, text browsers, cell phones, webTV, PDAs or even portable game pads and, in the not so far future, their refrigerator to order food online. Accessibility should be a must.”

“Owning a copy of Dreamweaver and letting it write the code does not make a person a Web Designer. Dreamweaver does not guarantee a good site; it is just a tool and is as lousy as the person using it.”

One common issue — particularly when it’s the marketing department commisioning the Web site — is the desire to design a site for visual appeal rather than usability.
“Web sites don’t need to be over-the-top to get results. Some clients will ask for lots of animation and cool graphics. They want a splash page built in Flash, and Javascript rollover images for menu items. They don’t understand that

1. these things can turn off visitors who don’t have a fast Internet connection or up-to-date browsers or extensions;
2. these things eat up bandwidth;
3. these things make a web site much less visible to search engines. In short, they rarely help, and often hurt, the majority of business web sites.”

At the extreme ends of the web design continuum there are two kinds of web sites. Neither of them “work” in the way most companies want their web sites to work.

On one end is the highly graphical, flashy, content poor web site with dancing babies and moving pictures and unbelievable poor navigational design. On the other extreme is the site with no graphics, 50 words of black text per page on a white background, loads of content, and text link navigation.

The graphical site will sell products all day long — if anyone gets to it. But no one will ever visit that site unless you send them there, one at a time, using other promotional mechanisms (such as TV, radio, print, direct mail, pens, cups, hats, blimps, billboards).

On the other hand, the simple text site will get hundreds, thousands, or millions of visitors who arrive there after searching for your product or service. Unfortunately, none of them will buy anything, contact you, or provide their contact information.

You have to shoot for a mix between the site which sells but gets no visitors, and the site which gets lots of visitors and does not compel action.

Flash can easily make your site useless to large numbers of possible customers. “Use it smartly,” he advises. “The ‘look’ is not as important on the web as in print. The web is about logic and structure. The structure should be defined by the content, not the look…. The ‘look’ is important but only to support the content… not to control the content.”

The Site Needs Maintenance
There are few things you can install in your business and then ignore completely. Unfortunately, that truism isn’t grasped by a lot of business owners, who expect that once a Web site is “done,” it can be ignored thereafter. Heilmann bemoans the misconception that a web product has a final date and then it’s finished. “Any web site that is not developed to be maintained is already outdated,” he cautions.

All web sites require at least some degree of maintenance, Campbell points out. “If a visitor comes to a site and sees a 2004 copyright at the bottom, or a class schedule that’s six months outdated, that site and that company tends to lose credibility. If a site is never updated, spiders from search engines start visiting less and less often and rankings in search engine results pages will drop. I have clients whose sites launched last year, and they never touched them again. They’re still wondering what went wrong, and why their web site didn’t ever bring them any business.”

Your existing IT staff isn’t the right “designer,” either. Cancilla’s primary pet peeve is clients — particularly corporate clients — “who don’t understand that their company Webmaster or IT-support person probably isn’t a Web designer or electronic communications specialist. I still see far too many Web sites designed by people who are great at server configuration but have no idea how to optimize HTML/CSS, or who can code beautifully but whose design or site-organization skills are lacking. And to make things worse, many of these people think they know more than enough to design or set content policies for a site.”
The other reason why most people in the Web industry are clueless is because they are in fact clowns from the print industry. These people take advantage of the fact that clueless clients often take designs at face value. If the client thinks it looks good, they’ll buy it.

If you wouldn’t do it to your customers in a real-life place of business, you shouldn’t do it to them on the web. (don’t make them wait, don’t hide from them, don’t blast them with loud music: be polite, welcoming and open)