Web site design overview

Web Design From Scratch offers a great high level view of designing a site. Here’s the skinny:

1. Know what you’re doing
2. Know what the site needs to do
3. Know what the site’s visitors want
4. Get a good picture of the personality and style of the web site
5. Sketch out highly successful scenarios
6. Organise views into a site map
7. Sketch the essential features & look
8. Map your visitors’ attention
9. Arrange the visual elements to work together

I encourage everyone to re-read this article before every project (myself included).

Designing using information patterns

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of 37signals‘ approach to application and Web design. There’s something about their approach that is exceptionally clear and easy to use.

Not too long ago, I found a blog post on their site that reveals the secret: patterns.

I encourage you to give the article a read and refer to it the next time you need to bring clarity to a collection of seemingly disparate information.

Four Sites Deconstructed

Jakob Nielsen analyzes four sites for usability in his April 14 column Four Bad Designs.

“Bad content, bad links, bad navigation, bad category pages… which is worst for business? In these examples, bad content takes the prize for costing the company the most money.”

Ouch.

Let me know what you think. Nielsen is a polarizing figure for Web designers, so I hope we can have some good discussion.