Creating Well Designed Web pages

Questions to Ask

• Why do you think that people put things on the web?
• Why do you go to web sites? Why do other people go to web sites?
• Who are you creating web pages for? (Audience).

Some Examples of Questionable Design

These are some examples that were references on Web Pages that Suck.

• Rhode Island School of Design. (Yes, it is a design school).
• The Art Center.
• St. Benedict's College has an example of Mystery Meat Navigation.

These are some places that I found with the help of friends.

• Renaissance Recording Studios. Look at this site with images turned off. A similar site is SurfMerchants.
• The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. Great content. Aweful navigation.

Good Examples

• Google. Simple design, quick to load.
• Amazon.com. Vince Flanders has a good discussion of why their site is good.
• UseIT.com
• edwardtufte.com. Tufte is an expert in information design.
• The War Against Silence
• EBay is intuitive, feature-rich, extremely well organized and fast loading.
• arXiv.org e-Print archive and The Econophysics Forum are examples simple sites that are useful and easy to navigate.
• Wolfram Research is a site that works well both with and without images enabled.
• refdesk.com is an example of very dense information display.
• The United States Postal Service web site is easy to navigate and well designed. Compare to the Massachusetts Government Portal which has so much information that it is confusing.

More Info

• Web Design Tips and Resources