The three incredibly important laws of a good website
- Thu, September 16 2010
- Filed under: Websites and web usability
One of the most consistent mistakes made by nonprofits is organizing their websites around their world view. The navigation correlates to the nonprofit’s program areas. The home page features a mission statement. The content corresponds to what the nonprofit’s staff finds interesting.
All bad mistakes.
The people coming to your website have their own set of priorities, and you’re probably getting in the way of their accessing the information they need!
The rules are:
1. Organize everything according to what your visitors seek
2. Stick to what people coming to the site care about
3. Make everything as simple as possible
In the words of the great John Maeda: “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
Okay. Now here’s what NOT to do. By way of Pamela Grow (read her if you don’t already), this great Xtra Normal video shows what it feels like to interact with a bad website for an orchestra.
Comments
Absolutely. Your points are the golden rules of information architecture. In short, design around the “personal missions” of your users. What are they trying to achieve?
It is increasingly critical as users migrate to the mobile web where clear, simple, and focused designed is essential.
Great post…and a good example of the simple yet satisfying.
I agree with the statement about simplicity. Sometimes sites tend to get over cluttered, which usually results in the visitor not staying long on your site. Keeping it simple won’t scare a 1st time visitor away.
Brilliant!! Thank you for sharing this video, Katya!
“Websites don’t annoy people. Designers do.” Nice.
Reminds me of a rule that I’ve heard used for so many different things - and now I realize I can apply to website design too! K.I.S.S - Keep It Simple S-.
Funny how sometimes the quest for designers to answer the many needs of people using a website that it can actually be less user-friendly when they’re done with it.
I completely agree with you. Simplicity is a key factor in designing a web page. Sometimes the designers try to go too fancy and they do not focus on the important points that is to go simple and capture the users attention. Too many fancy things distract users attention. Go simple
Good work, and keep updating your blog
I completely agree with you. Sometimes the web-page designers try to go too fancy and they forget the key points. It’s better to keep it simple to attract customers.
Good job and keep updating your blog
“Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”
this is absolutely true! brilliant words from a brilliant man.
Here one i love - viewability and readablity.
Some sites just make my eyes water! Black background with blue text. i guess the designer thought he or she was being “cute”.
Too bad we can’t revolk their “internet” privileges.
nice article by the way 
This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so true. Keeping it simple and focused on your visitors will serve you well.
I like rule # 2. Oftentimes we put a lot of things in our website specially once our site begins to get traffic. We think that cluttering our site will be good for the visitors. But that is a big mistake. When we fill our site with so many things, our site will lose its identity and will confuse the visitors. When this happens, expect the traffic to go down considerably.
I completely agree. Simplicity is the key. Too much information can be exactly that, too much. It even make it harder for people to get what information they are looking at. Great post!
“Make everything as simple as possible.” This is a very good advice. Nowadays it is quite difficult to find useful yet simple websites. This makes it really hard to determine the real function of a website. Simplicity makes everything clearer and more user friendly.