The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Site | Hacker News Reader

The Anatomy of a Perfect Web Site

johanbrook.com

81 pointsjohanbrook17 comments

The author is a Swedish designer. He sees the world with the Northern European, Braun and IKEA mindset: minimalist and functional.

I respect and like it. But only for things and spaces that you need to use so often that you almost forget they exist. And only works for people that are open to this approach.

In some cultures (e.g: India and South America) you'd need to put a lot of gold and bling to catch people's attention. We like it baroque/art-noveau style: flamboyant, shiny and extravagant like a Carnaval parade or a Bollywood movie.

There was a point, a while ago, where drawing the line between Design and Art Direction was all the rage amongst design bloggers. If you read that link considering this particular distinction (that is, Design as opposed to Art Direction), the impression it gives is that the author is considering function, yes, but not preaching anything about style.

To be sure: he chose a minimalist ("under-designed") webpage on purpose to make a point. To wit: well-crafted Design (as opposed to Art Direction) can produce a User Experience orders of magnitude better than beautiful Art Direction that's not functionally tied to the content it surrounds.

EDITed to add: In fact, at no point does the author say that minimum is preferrable to flamboyant. What he says in his conclusion section, rather, is: "Design without context is not design. It’s noise." That is: form without function is not design, and in fact it adds noise to the overall message.

Another EDIT: I stand corrected about the definition of Art Direction. It is so much more than just the bling, and it's also supposed to be functional. But "pointless bling is noise" is still how I read the original article. Here's a nice link on Art Direction vs Design: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/art-direction-and-design/

The best design for a site depends heavily on who it is targeted at.

It is simply not true that a bare minimum is best for all sites.

The example site is an academic and very functional site, and will appeal to a person who goes to it looking for specific and easily accessible information.

As a site for drawing the interest of children, or teenagers it will probably fail.

As a site for getting people to buy a product it will probably fail.

I agree that the website is quite functional and presents great content but I don't believe it conveys great design aesthetics. Some of the problems that I instinctively felt were:

- Intuitively I do not expect the clickable diagrams to be 'clickable'. It is sort of hidden in a plain looking site. If you don't look carefully, you might miss it.

- The choice of colors are inconsistent across the site.

- Unlike what the closing note suggests, it would be a little challenging to adopt the table-based 2-column layout for a more 'responsive design' suiting smaller screens.

"Design without context is not design. It’s noise."

I can't possibly upvote this enough. 99% of websites I visit have too much style, and I think it's better to go under than over.

http://chortle.ccsu.edu/CS151/cs151java.html

  * no doctype
  * first line HTML comment -> quirks mode (or whatever we call it nowadays)

If the content is great and accessible, and the visitor leaves the website satisfied, who cares?

Those who will maintain the site. In any case, table layout is not that accessible.

In what way is this table layout not that accessible? I just fired up Voice Over and it read the page in the expected order. (Heading, left text, right text, chapter list.) The only complaint I would have is the bad alt text on images in the chapters (but every site has that problem it seems).

The font size can be increased without much issue (again, no more than most sites).

* I'm not blind or hard of sight, so I'm not an authority on these things. Just curious.

By all means, if you are the creator of a website, be as standards-compliant as possible. As a visitor, is it important if the browser is in quirks mode or not? Do you validate every website you visit?

Tables are fine for tabular data. The data on this site is (mostly!) tabular.

No doctype means quirks mode, does not matter what's on the first line.

I don't understand the point, even a minimalist design is a design.

This is Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway corporate website: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

It's very simple and clean.

Interestingly enough, the site hasn't changed much since the 90's here is a link from the Way Back Machine

May 30, 1997

http://web.archive.org/web/19970530212007/http://www.berkshi...

The latest version has this interesting bit on the head

It's only interesting to me because in my short life as a developer its the first time i see this MSHTML reference, if you are like me here is a good read:

Trident (also known as MSHTML) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine)#cite_no...

According to this version 8 was the first to pass the ACID 2.1 test, the article links for reference this blog post from Microsoft that is dated 2009 - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/01/09/the-internet-e...

I'm guessing the latest update to that site wasn't long ago, makes me think about the process they have to change a site like this, for such a clean site, i think it has passed the test of time, and it reminds me how much Microsoft rules on the Corporate world.

Considering who he is and what he is "selling" that's all he needs. Buffet tries to cultivate folksiness and the site goes along with that.

Now take Donald Trump who is of course not as successful as Buffet but his site is much different http://www.trump.com complete with flash or whatever. For what he is trying to sell that's the approach that he needs. He also dresses better than Warren because of what he is objective is.

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