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113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group)
Summary: These design guidelines are excerpted from our book Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed which contains more details, including copiously annotated screenshots of 50 homepages. While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high. Your homepage is often your first — and possibly your last — chance to attract and retain each customer, rather like the front page of a newspaper. One of the biggest values of a newspaper's front page is the priority given to top news items. All homepages would benefit from being treated like a front page of a major newspaper, with editors who determine the high-priority content and ensure continuity and style consistency.Web design can be deceptively difficult, as it involves achieving a design that is both usable and pleasing, delivers information and builds brand, is technically sound and visually coherent. Add to this the fact that many Web designers (myself included) are self-taught, that Web design is still novel enough to be only a side subject in many design institutions, and that the medium changes as frequently as the underlying technology does. So today I’ve put together my 9 principles for good Web design . These are only my opinions and I’ve tried to link off to more reading on subjects so you don’t only hear my voice. Obviously, I have lots of disclaimers: rules are made to be broken, different types of design work differently, and I don’t always live up to my own advice. So please read these as they are intended–just some observations I am sharing…
9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design - PSDTUTS
Usability.gov
Enhancing the User Experience! Usability.gov is a one-stop source for government web designers to learn how to make websites more usable, useful, and accessible. The site addresses a broad range of factors that go into web design and development.
The ten most egregious offenses against users. Web design disasters and HTML horrors are legion, though many usability atrocities are less common than they used to be. Since my first attempt in 1996, I have compiled many top-10 lists of the biggest mistakes in Web design. See links to all these lists at the bottom of this article. This article presents the highlights: the very worst mistakes of Web design.
Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Top 10 Web Design Mistakes
Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show. Many companies, particularly in the high tech industry, use vague or generic language to describe their purpose. Obscuring this basic fact makes it much harder for users to interpret a website's information and services.