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Perfect website design? What are the qualities?

 
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emm
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Post Post subject: Perfect website design? What are the qualities? Reply with quote

What do you people think are the qualities of a perfect web site design? What makes you think, wow this website is just perfect?
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Last edited by emm on Sat Sep 11, 04 2:38 am; edited 1 time in total
Fri Sep 10, 04 3:20 am
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quantum
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Post Post subject: Top 10 qualities of a perfect website Reply with quote

Very nice thread. I hope everybody joins this thread and expresses their opinion.

IMO any website that strives for perfection must be:

1. Attention grabing to the eyes in first visit. That means nice color contrast and creative design.
2. Content centric. Must dissipate useful information. Not just eye candy. Website is not an abstarct painting to just look at. It is an interactive media that primarily provides information.
3. Extremely easy navigation to fly through the paes of the website.
4. Must be very search engine friendly!
5. As fast loading as possible.
6. No spelling or silly grammer mistake. Content written in strong and attractive language.
7. The website's purpose is clear as soon as the user enters the website.
8. Works with almost all browsers and browsers settings. I understand this is hard to gain, because there is no universal standard maintained by ALL!
9. The website does not have any distraction, that include script/layout errors, popups, banner ads or even stupid animated gifs or flash. Specially the way Flash is being used with so many websites is plainly disgusting. Flash is a great tool that is being abused by the ametaures.
10. Readable matching font.

That's the top 10 I guess that comes to my mind. May come up with more later.
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Dust fills my eyes / Clouds roll by / and I roll with them / Centuries cry / Orders fly / and I fall again
Afford best design, implement best solution. Outsource your web design.
Fri Sep 10, 04 11:08 am
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hasnatme
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Post Post subject: Reply with quote

Everybody has a different "perfect" Web site, because everybody has different needs. The perfect Web sites for a cell phone user, an IE user, and a blind user may be completely different.

Interestingly, they usually turn out to be the same. When people visit a Web site, they are interested in content. If you bog down the content with design, you will only make the information less easy to access. For instance, if you look at Candy Stand it has all these hoops the user has to jump through just to play a game! It would be much better made if the main page simply contained a list of games, with optionally a shrunken screenshot of the game, with a login box. It would be rediculously easy to find the game you want to play via the main site. Which would be a great thing.

In the perfect Web site, the design helps clarify the information and actually decreases the amount of time it takes for the user to get what he/she wants. For the archetypal example of such a Web site design, see Google itself.

Unfortunately, most designers are concerned with throwing art in the way of the user's quest for information.

I believe the perfect Web site has the following properties (not a complete list, of course):

1. It keeps font size and family at the user's preference. This way, it is guaranteed that the user can read comfortably (or tolerably).

2. The site's purpose is made clear instantly.

3. The visitor knows what his current "location" is. That is, the site's contents has a clearly-defined structure (tree-like? linear? categorized?), and each page clearly indicates the user's current location within those contents.

4. Nothing breaks the user's standard model of a Web site interface -- all links are underlined, all links are colored the same (unless you have, say, a different color for external links than internal links and you make this clear to the user with a legend). Linked images must be outlined in the site's link color. No page has links which point to the page itself. Nothing breaks when javascript is turned off, unless it is a specialized Javascript application that is a content of a page itself, such as an online Reverse Polish Notation calculator.

5. All information is marked up in a semantically-correct manner, and heading structure follows an H1-H2-H3-... ordering, without skipping levels.

6. CSS, not tables, should be used for layout, if there is any. Typically, no special layout DIVs should be needed. Navigation is for index.html pages, typically -- other pages should have links at the top and bottom that refer back to the index page. (See IT Communication for an example of a site which follows this model.) Universally-copied navigation menus are a no-no; they are almost always irrelevant (unless the site has a categorized structure, and one of the menu items indicates the current location. On very small sites (3-10 documents) with this structure, universal menus are ok.)

7. Long documents must have a table of contents at their top.

And Ofcourse....rest of the comments goes with Quantum.

NB:Concept Taken From Internet.
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Fri Sep 10, 04 1:59 pm
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emm
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Post Post subject: Reply with quote

Good answers. But I think, some of emm's answers are not applicable to complete flash websites. It means full flash websites can never be perfect? For example with a complete flash website it is not posible to have the font dynamically change in size to the users' preference. This is a browser property.

Quantum,

What would you consider to be the best minimum or maximum size of web page?
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“You might say reality is the result of complex negotiations between the observer and the observed. But that is simply a point of view…”
Digital Bangladesh
Sat Sep 11, 04 2:37 am
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quantum
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Post Post subject: Perfect website design solution Reply with quote

If your page has too little content(by content I mean text content, not images and stuffs), that is not good for search engines. Get at least 6 KB of content on each page. With CSS, javascript, images etc. the total file size must not be above 80 kb. Though yahoo main page has over 150 kb with everything. I highly discourage that.


More tips on perfect website design:

a. Don't use Flash for navigation or animation unless it is really necessary or compliments the page. You loose anchor text keywording linking that way.

b. Do not use mystery meat navigation. Meaning that the link does not tell you what the page is about. Or hidden link that shows up when you move your mouse over something!
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Dust fills my eyes / Clouds roll by / and I roll with them / Centuries cry / Orders fly / and I fall again
Afford best design, implement best solution. Outsource your web design.
Sun Sep 12, 04 4:58 am
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dude
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Post Post subject: Reply with quote

I know you people may not agree with me because this is a complete Flash website. But I think this is a perfect website.

http://2methods.com/secondmethod/

And the static website examples:

Perfect website 1
Perfect website 2
Sun Sep 12, 04 8:10 am
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hasnatme
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Post Post subject: Reply with quote

Agreed...Cause I have said everybody have a diffrent perfect website.
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Sun Sep 12, 04 1:15 pm
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emm
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Post Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, perfect is a relative concept and depends on who is looking at it. But even so I think most things that are considered perfect by most people have many things in common. Like, say noone in right mind and education would call a Dhaliood movie perfect. May be some will. But I don't think that counts!
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“You might say reality is the result of complex negotiations between the observer and the observed. But that is simply a point of view…”
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Sun Sep 12, 04 10:57 pm
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dude
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Post Post subject: Definition: Perfect web design Reply with quote

Definition: Perfect web design:

A perfect web design is the one that perfectly performs what the website is purported to do.

If it is a information website it should give out information perfectly. The navigation, readability is main issue here. If it is to show off design skill and artistic ability then it should be designed as such to be called perfect.
Wed Sep 15, 04 8:38 am
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