What is good web design, anyway?

bv

@bv:

This means that form follows function, not the other way around.

I don't know who used that expression first and it is as right as it is wrong - sometimes the form creates the function.

I guess this boils down to how you define "follows". We have probably all seen sites where the visual design is made without any thought to the user or the possible use cases. The worst I have seen - on several sites, and even back when people were using slow dial-up lines - was a logo and a huge picture on a black background. If you did not guess that you should click on the picture (and the pointer did not change when you hovered over it), you would not get anywhere. The logo was not clickable.

If the form creates functionality, it still means that the form serves the function. That is something very different from form hiding or hindering function.

QuHno

I fully agree to that. Every design (3) has to be user centric or it will fail in the end.

… and of course design (1) and (2) should not be too abstract - shoving layer of abstraction upon layer of abstraction leads to slow pages most of the time.
Every designer (1) and (2) should ask (her|him)self what (s)he is doing wrong if (s)he uses more than 2 different frameworks at the same time ...

(I am a fan of vanilla code, but I can understand that sometimes libraries, frameworks or pre-fabricated code snippets are used for a reason)

ghostine

On the other hand, for sites used to display videos or lots of graphics, the page should not be over-crowded and busy, but instead perhaps have fairly small 'preview' image-links near the top that jump the user down to the page's location where that item is featured in full or with details; otherwise, the page should scroll smoothly down/up its full length without causing the browser a lot of grief (jumping, white-screening, etc).

http://www.chudu24.com/

Dr.Flay

The company I used to work for had 1 main rule for web design.
The visitor must be where they need to be, within 3 clicks.
It forces your designers to keep the navigation obvious and simple, without you having to tell them to.

Zenya

do you have any info how to link music to my blog on Vivaldi. ? I am from Opera and it was easy to do it there . Is there a code ?

domsch1988

In the past weeks i've ran across so many poorly designed websites, it's unreal.
So, my personal wishlist:

There is NO reason not to use SSL. Encrypt your site. No excuses. For no Traffic. Ever.
No fixed values for UI elements. We do use Smartphones more and more. No need for a full mobile site, but at least make it, so your fonts and UI elements scale and don't overlap.
Clearly seperate Adds and Content
Every site "should" have a light and dark mode. Some of us work on a PC all day. Looking at white backgrounds all the time is really annoying and it takes me hundreds of lines of css injection to fix this
Standard Fonts only. Nothing worse than a wesite using a font you don't have and rendering complete trash.
Widen the content to the space you've got. We've mostly switched to 16:10 and wider displays years ago. Having a website in Fullscreen use 30% in the middle is dumb. We all got big displays, make use of them.

Apart from that, i agree with most things already said.

LonM

All major text blocks in legible font with good contrast to a light background

The number of times I've come across sites and apps that insist on putting grey text on a white background (or worse, on a dark grey background and passing that off as a "night mode") is very disheartening.

JuanMark

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guigirl

My personal ideal for good web design is to have nice evenly-spaced circumferential strands, with equally-spaced radial arms, such that the resultant interstitials are 50% of my smallest target meal diameter. Most important is the need for an even tension in all the arms; i mean, duh.

hlehyaric

@guigirl You forgot: Purple everywhere.

lilywane

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