What are, in your opinion, the best designed sites?

[Destructionator XV]

A well designed site in my opnion should meet these three criteria, in order of decreasing importance:

1) Ease of use. It should be easy to find and get to what you need or want from a website. This is the most important aspect: if you have a pretty site but noone can find anything useful, your website failed.

2) Well formed from a technical aspect. Your website should stay close to the standards. This way, it is viewable from different machines. It shoudln't abuse things like Flash or Javascript. This is closly tied into ease of use: I want it to be easy to use, no matter what browser I want to use.

3) Look decent. Only after your website is working well should you worry about the cosmetics. As far as I'm concered, a pure text and link website is one of the best designs avaliable, but some people manage to pull off pretty graphics too (phpBB is a good example of this). But looking nice is a plus, as long as you don't sacrifice usability for looks.


With those criteria, I can look for what I think are well designed websites. Here are a few of the better ones:

http://stardestroyer.net
Mike Wong did a great job making his site easy to use and packed with information. The little amount of graphic work he did is very well placed and not over done.

My complaints with it are few. One big one is he decided to use frames for the navigation. He did provide a frameless page too and jumping out of his frames is easy enough for a user like me, but if he provided a noframes link in the table of contents he would have done well.

The frames also hurt bookmarks (this is a big one: I like cut and pasting the address form my browser). While the damage they do is minimal on the site, I still feel a pure noframe version would be better.

A very small complaint is the splash screen. Splash screens to nothing to sites except waste bandwidth and time. But they are easily bypassed, so this is no big deal.

Lastly, another small complaint is there is not much CSS in the site. He uses capital letters in markup (which is prohibited in the XHTML 1.0 spec) and tables for layout (tag abuse!), but these aren't too bad mistakes and make no effect on the usability of his site. The reason for all this is surely that it was written before CSS became common, so I will forgive this.

Also, Mike's home page and creationism pages are slightly better as they do not have frames. All well done.

Three pretty minor complaints about a big website like that. Good job, Mr. Wong.

http://slackware.com/
The official site of Slackware Linux. It has a nice look to is, and is very easy to use. My main complaint here again stems from the coding methods, which like Wong's sites, no significant impact on usage, and no impace at all if using a modern major browser.

http://www.google.com/
The famous search engine. Simple and to the point. I have no complaints about it. Ditto for all google sites, including gmail, which is certainly my favourite webmail program EVAR.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
Eric S. Raymond's jargon file. The code is perfect, the layout simple and clean, the colors easy on the eyes. Navigation is easy, and search is provided by a google bar on a seperate page. I can think of no ways to improve it.

http://www.gnu.org/
The home of the GNU - the open source operating system. Once again, easy to read colors, easy navigation, simple layout. The coding is excellent. I like it.



You can probably see the common theme here: less is more. Simple design, easy navigation, easy colours and to the point layouts leads you to a win with me.

Now, lets take a look at some terrible websites.

http://sirius.com/
The website of SIRIUS Satellite Radio, which I am forced to use almost every day at work, is a design straight from hell. Let's list the gripes one by one.

1) It is a motherfucking Flash site. What if I don't have Flash, assholes? What if I don't want Flash because it wastes memory and CPU time? Apparently they don't care; they didn't even bother making a non-Flash version,

2) If you are even one pixel off on their 'menus' it goes back away. I don't have a very steady hand; I can barely use that at all.

3) Navigation is a nightmare. If you want to find what channel a particular artist is on, well tough luck (this consists of customers bitching out us poor customer service reps when we don't know either). Many links are hidden where you would never look. Eariler this year, they had the NFL schedual on the site, but you had to click 3 obscure links to get to its link which was only the word here. After I bitched out corporate about this for 3 months they finally increased the text size of the here link Better, but still sucks ass.

4) It uses a fixed size for everything. What if I am not using the same resolution as you, assholes? Apparently they don't care.

5) Animations everywhere! Way to distract me from their text, which says nothing useful, by the way.

6) Inverting colours. They really don't want me reading that text, do they?

7) I seriously can't read that text on my monitor. And I have a nice monitor and graphics card in an excellent browser. That is a killer.

8) The media player. It often doesnt work at all, and even when it is working as it is supposed to it sucks. It requires Windows Media Player on Internet Explorer with security turned down to almost nothing to work right. Fuck that.

Jesus, I hate that company. And the incomptent idiots they have working for them,



So, what are some of your best and worse websites you have seen?