Design for the World Wide Web

It does not matter much in most (functional-value-delivering) cases. There are plenty of successful Ugly Websites out there. And just using BootStrap to achieve non-Ugly is almost always Good Enough. What do I mean by not-matter-much?

• when a business fails, it's almost never because of their web-design, it's usually about the offering not being compelling
• gains in business metrics from "improved design" are (almost always) marginal once you're over the "BootStrap bar"

The above might not be true if you have a true A-player as designer, but in most products you don't need that.

"It" has mostly always been bad, because designers/managers tend to push beyond what the browser is good at (at a given point in time), in trying to mimic other media (esp magazines).

These days it sucks more because of

• enshittification than the "underlying" design
• complex-interaction/transaction "app" sites where nobody understands usability, which can be "solved" by
  • having coherent strategic context
  • trying to think like your user - which requires having a coherent/explicit ideal customer persona
  • defining a coherent job to be done for that user
  • looking at feature/step/page adoption counts (logging, including userid)
  • periodic usability testing

old notes

see also CSS

• Steve Champeon on Progressive Enhancement and the Future of Web Design (2003!) - good for Mobile world?
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Enhancement
  • more recently: Responsive Web
• pop-up code http://www.alistapart.com/articles/popuplinks/

Need some references for decent-looking WebLog-s, to tweak the template for WikiLog usage. Need:

• focus on content, not shmutz
• design that looks good for long single-story pages, as well as listing page
• when looking at example, need to bump up font size to where I like it.

Examples from ~2005:

• http://www.zeldman.com/essentials/ (palette, fine lines)
• http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mamamusings/ (basic gray bg for section, may use for transcluded items on Front Page)
• http://www.playgroundblues.com/ recommended by Jeffrey Zeldman
• http://www.bryanbell.com/radioThemes/
• http://www.bryanbell.com/myThemes
• http://themes.weblogger.com/
• nice icons http://www.webiconsets.com/
• Sept'2010 Twitter Golden Ratio layout