Webdesign has to deal with balancing the demands of usability with the aesthetics of good design. It is not an easy task and go too far into the usability side of things and look horrible. Or it can go into the design side - ie flash website - and be unusable but look very cool. One usability aspect which should now be universal is having street addresses as text, not images, as La Grande Orange has on their website.

Google maps has become universal and I cut and paste every address into it in order to have a quick look at where an address is. The other usability aspect from this is that an address should be on one line. While websites such as Mapquest take the old relational database approach where an address is split up into its components with each having a new textfield, google maps puts the address on one line.

Minimalsites.com collects minimalist website design. Their philosophy revolves around less is more and doing more with less is the goal. Webdesign is a bit different than just design, especially design aesthetics, because people's browsing habits are better described as informed glances. So usability is exceptionally important. However, minimalism is consistent with high usability so there is a natural union there. This site was designed along minimalist lines.

Designfeedr argues for ditching color and exploring black and white in design. From the article:

Working in black-and-white is essentially a limitation, you have one less tool at your disposal after all. You'll have to get by without using color to set the mood or focal point. Once you get the hang of working without color though you'll start to see that the limitation you imposed on yourself actually has some very strong benefits.

Black and White in webdesign ends up being difficult as the difference between #000 and #FFF on a back lit screen are strong and without gray injected into the mix it can be tough for the eyes. However, done well and it can be a stunning design. For instance: Subtraction, Non-format, Scrollie, Designate Online and Back to Help. Mike and Maaike also have a black and white design, but it is an awful website. Why would I want to enter their site when I am already on it? The inside is difficult to navigate as well. Poor design.

For webdesign, rather than black and white, it is interesting to focus on a minimal palette. This site for instance uses pale blue, brown and shades of gray; plus copious amounts of white space in order to relax the eye and present information. Minimalsites.com has plenty more in that style of minimalism.

This is the desklight from conof. I don't see anywhere on their website to buy it. If you are in the business of selling products and someone hits your site, interested in your product, "buy it here" is the logical link to present the user with.

The same with the Nikon camera on this website. I clicked through to Amazon as I am interested in a camera that can handle dim light better than my current one. I wanted to know how expensive it was, but under price there is the line, "To see our price, add this item to your cart. You can always remove it later. Why don't we show the price?" I was interested enough to put it into the cart, after I whinged about it first, and for those interested it was $1,400 or so. I don't see why I had to put it in my cart to see how expensive it was. And for FWIW I didn't read their explanation as to why, I don't care enough.

Some more incongruities. If the free market is supposed to aid in price transparency, the most opaque industry I have come across is the US health care system. Prior to the operation on my shoulder I could not get a price out of anyone. I was told numerous times about the 90:10 and 70:30 for out/in coverage. It was also made clear that the Doctor, Anaethesiologist and Medical Center would all bill me independently. But I could not get dollar amounts. The bills trickled in and it wasn't that much, but still I would have liked to have known my liabilities before hand. I was in enough pain however that I would have paid a lot more to have it go away.

My partner and I were looking through a free modernist magazine while we were having breakfast the other morning when a fireplace caught her eye. She asked me to remember the URL so she could visit their website later. The next day she emailed me from work, "What was the URL again?" Which I duly replied to her. The next email from her was, "Their website sucks."

She couldn't find what she wanted and the website went out of its way to make it difficult for her to find the product and information she was interested in.

Most websites are not designed for customers. They are designed for the company, they want people to know who they are, give them a feel for them, all the things they do, etc. Customers literally do not care about that.

If someone goes out of their way enough to remember a URL - which is rare - then they want to know purchase information; how much and how quickly. Consequently the product had better be on the front page. If it isn't, then it better be easy to find, like within one click, and the information the user wants better be right there and then.

It wasn't.

Strike one customer.

The internet is a big place with a lot of competing businesses and if the website is even slightly annoying there are numerous places a potential customer can go.

In my opinion, any company with under twenty products, should put them all on the front page of the website with all the information a user needs to know to buy them. A click or a navigation bar in that instance is a waste of programming and web development time.

An interesting approach to form design by unit interactive. Forms are problematic as the business usually demands way too specific information from the customer. Filling out forms to apply for a position at a company are the worst. Anyone who has been forced to do that through monster or dice would be aware, enough that people will give up if it becomes too inconvenient, especially when the data doesn't properly fit the paradigm the form designer demands.

There are other absurdities in form design, such as requiring people to choose VISA, American Express, etc when you can tell what card it is from the first four numbers of the card. Another is when form designers match the form directly to their database, such as an address, there is really no reason why a user should have to fill out the address, city, zipcode in separate chunks - other than the system's database was designed that way; a type of tyranny from data normalization.

Several tech blogs are discussing how AJAX applications and the lazy architectures developers use to support AJAX interaction is slowing down websites. Lazy is a bad word, heavyweight MVC is probably a better one. There are also mechanisms to give faster page feedback than to rely on the MVC architecture alone.

Technology is up against human limits and just how long an individual - or customer' - attention can be maintained on information being returned from a server before they drift off and seek something else. Web users are brutal for having a million other places they can go, do, and a million other web companies that offer similar services to yours. The paragraph that is more often quoted is:

After a bit of looking, Marissa [google] explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.

This conclusion may be surprising - people notice a half second delay? - but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.

The nature of the internet is that it can be fraught with difficulty trying to measure performance when doing large software projects. Fast is horribly subjective until it comes face to face with a metric like 'revenue'. Then again, the benefit of AJAX is the asynchronous aspect and it can be hard giving that up in a rich internet application as it keeps a user on the page rather than the whole page doing a round trip.