A Decade of Good Website Design

The web looks very different today than it did 15 years ago. Back in 1994, Yahoo had only just launched, most website design was text-based and Amazon, Google and eBay had yet to appear.

Website Design Principles

But some things have stayed constant in that decade, namely the principles of what makes a website design easy to use. Dr. Neilsen has looked back at a decade of design work on usability and considered whether the core guidelines drawn up then are relevant to the web of today.

"Roughly 80% of the things we found 10 years ago are still an issue today," he said. "Some have gone away because users have changed and 10% have changed because technology has changed."

Website Designs for Sore Eyes

Some website design crimes, such as splash screens that get between a user and the site they are trying to visit, and experts indulging their artistic urges have almost disappeared.

The basic website design principles of usability, centering on ease of use and clear thinking about a design, are as important as ever. They are still important because the net has not changed as much as people thought it would.

Website Design Decision

Dr. Nielsen said the success of websites such as Google, Amazon, eBay and Yahoo showed that close attention to design and user needs was important. All of their sites are based on user empowerment and make it easy for people to do things on the internet.

Website design pays a large part in the success of the Internet, but in the future search engines will play an even bigger part in helping people get to grips with the huge amount of information online, in that they are becoming like the operating system to the internet. However, the fact that they are useful now, does not mean that they could not do better.

Currently, search sites do not do a very good job of describing the information that they return in response to queries. Often people had to look at a website design just to judge whether it was useful or not.

Maximise Your Online Potential

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