What Website has the Cleanest Site Design?

Gabe Anast asks: "The recent article on Microsoft's market dominance referred to an article at the International Herald Tribune, which I read until I became engrossed in the natural readability and intuitive interface of that site. It's amazing! I'll have to say that site has the cleanest design of any I have ever used. So, of course, I thought 'What are the other "best designed" sites? Would Slashdot know? My personal criteria for site design is: graphic design/appeal; an intuitive interface; and content that flows naturally (eg: high content density that does not sacrifice clarity). What are your favorite sites, and by what criteria do you judge such?"

Comments

Easy

[sporty]

Google.com

Easy interface, easy results.

Re:Easy

[gl4ss]

funny thing that google.com is sometimes the best interface to some sites too, as some sites are really hard to manouver but it's really easy then to make up few words that will take you straight where you want on that site.

the less there is the better usually. ads should not be getting too much space and useless bloating by providing links to other pages of the same provider(that have nothing to do with the content) are usually useless on every page.

in fact these 'navigational' bars sometimes make the navigating much more difficult, since they tend to make it so that you get everywhere from one point. now this might seem smart and useful, but would you rather have easier time finding where you are going with a room that had 300 doors, or finding where you want to be in structure where there was like 4 doors from every room with signs saying what are you going towards..

Re:Easy

[fredrikj]

funny thing that google.com is sometimes the best interface to some sites too, as some sites are really hard to manouver but it's really easy then to make up few words that will take you straight where you want on that site.

Case in point: slashdot.org. Seriously, Slashdot's search function rarely takes me to the article I'm looking for, while with Google I always get there if I just remember one or two words from the headline.

Re:Easy

[aster_ken]

I totally agree. I search Slashdot like this:

http://www.google.com/

search terms here site:slashdot.org

Obvious to you or I, but I'm hoping this post is useful to someone.

Re:Easy

[Loosewire]

bah - beat me to it by 10 seconds :_(

Re:Easy

[bedessen]

Agreed. Slashdot's pathetic search function can't even search the body of comments, just the title. When is the title of a post ever really that meaningful? Hardly ever. There are a bunch of times I remember some tidbit in a post but unless it was moderated up, or appears at the top of a thread (and thus is included in the ".shtml" archive version of the page which Google spiders), it's almost completely impossible to find.

Or how about the ability to force the search on stories to only match ALL keywords? I know you can order by some nebulous score, but how hard really would it be to add the option to say "find stores that contain all of the following keywords" and then sort that by date? Come on folks, slashdot.org/search.pl is a pathetic piece of crap.

I'm sure there are arguments as to why this is ("too much database load" is a popular one), or "patches are always welcome" is another popular copout.

Sheesh.

Re:Easy

[brendotroy]

Or, if you use the toolbar (I know, it's only available to a few OS/browser combos) just type your search terms in and click the "search this site" button while you're on a /. page. Also potentially helpful (and obvious).

http://toolbar.google.com/

Re:Easy

[SpaceLifeForm]

Also, a clean home page.

If you want to drive away people quickly, just load the homepage up with graphics.

Re:Easy

[the uNF cola]

Know what's funny? Second first post in a row with a +3 or higher. ph34r m3. ;)

Re:Easy

[zerblat]

Or, in Mozilla etc, you can create a bookmark to

javascript:location= 'http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s%20site:' +new String(location.href ).replace(/http:..([^\/]*)\/.*/, "$1")

(Minus any spaces inserted by /.) If you give it a keyword e.g. sts, you can use it by typing "sts search terms" into your location bar.

Re:Easy

[jhoffoss]

Opera and IE+XP Powertools let you create a prefix URL, so in the address textbox, I just type "g search terms here" and it executes the search. I also have y (yahoo) and gl (google/i feel lucky) search prefixes. You can do this with any site, you just perform a search and put "%s" where you want the search terms to show up. Handiest thing I've ever used in a browser.

Re:Easy

[dublin]

Or, if you use the toolbar (I know, it's only available to a few OS/browser combos) just type your search terms in and click the "search this site" button while you're on a /. page

Actually, the original version of the Google toolbar was a set of JavaScript links for use with Netscape. The IE-specific version came out later. The originals can be used with any JavaScript compatible browser. Here they are, the original and a few handy modifications, for those that don't know the trick. Add these to your Personal Toolbar folder in Netscape/Mozilla for easy access to useful stuff. Also, note that you can now search by selecting text in the page and pressing the script link, or just pressing the script link and then filling in the dialog box. Really handy. Paste each one in as all one line, of course, since /. and/or your browser will certainly make them multiple lines unless you have the monitor I wish I had.

Note: Something here on /. (at least in preview mode) is inserting extra spaces in the URLs below (they are NOT there in what I submit!) Cut out spaces that look like they don't belong and it should work.

Google:

javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;i<fra mes.length;i++){q=frames[i].document.getSelection( );if(q)break;}if(!q)void(q=prompt('Enter text to search using Google. You can also highlight a word on this web page before clicking Google Search.',''));if(q)location.href='http://www.googl e.com/search?client=googlet&q='+escape(q)

Modified version for Dictionary.com:

javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;i<fra mes.length;i++){q=frames[i].document.getSelection( );if(q)break;}if(!q)void(q=prompt('Enter text to lookup using Dictionary.com. You can also highlight a word on this web page before clicking Dictionary Search.',''));if(q)location.href='http://www.dicti onary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term='+escape(q)

Yet another modified version that lets you jump directly to a URL that is just text, not a link, on the page:

javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;i<fra mes.length;i++){q=frames[i].document.getSelection( );if(q)break;}if(!q)void(q=prompt('Enter or Select URL.',''));if(q)location.href='http://'+(q)

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I detest Microsoft, I've reached the conclusion that the GPL is a greater long-term threat.

Please explain.

Without a doubt

[Loosewire]

Google - even their ads are clean and not obtrusive.

Re:Without a doubt

[limekiller4]

Loosewire writes:
"Google - even their ads are clean and not obtrusive."

I guess so! My first reaction when I read this was, "Google has ads?!"

Not obtrusive indeed! =)

Re:Without a doubt

[Loosewire]

The fact that its ads (paid for listings on the right of the main results) are so unobtrusive and not some rapidly flashing things trying to get my attention means i click on them more.

Re:Without a doubt

[afidel]

If you've never used a google ad you are missing out. Unlike 99% of sites their ads are on target and if you are looking for a product rather than information they will almost always be a good place to look. In fact in my decade+ of web surfing I believe google is the only site that has led my by ad to a place I bought something =)

Re:Without a doubt

[Telastyn]

I'd like to add craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/). Nice; simple, well orginized and speedy.

Re:Without a doubt

[twinkyminator]

If you search for something that you can buy, sometimes the first result is a link to for example: ebay.com (and the result, with description and stuff got another background color), that is kinda annoying. Otherwise I completly agree, slashdot and google for president!

Re:Without a doubt

[Anonymous Coward]

Please learn how to code links.
craigslist

I nominated the OLD BBC news site

[Yarn]

The current one's not bad, but it's sliding downhill in my opinion. In the hall of shame I think we find The Register, and the random story ordering.

7 Letters

[Paul Burney]

G - O - O - G - L - E

well, only four distinct letters...

Re:7 Letters

[sc00p18]

I think that's 6, bubba.

Re:7 Letters

[ccmay]

4 distinct letters, dingleberry. Two of them are repeats.

-ccm

Re:7 Letters

[byolinux]

...er excuse me, dingleberry, but the thread title is '7 letters'...

your mistake. ;)

A few minutes ago....

[Anonymous Coward]

It was OS NEws, that had the cleanest design. I am including a screen shot for your perusal.

Unable to connect to databse.

.

Why, my own of course

[krs-one]

My own of course. Its clean, table-less, and is valid XHTML1.0 Strict.

-Vic

Re:Why, my own of course

[mabster]

And yet, when I click View|Text Size|Largest, your site's font doesn't change.

Makes it difficult for readers who can't read small fonts, I would say.

Re:Why, my own of course

[krs-one]

Hmm, in my client, Mozilla, it works just fine. Perhaps you should upgrade ;)

-Vic

Re:Why, my own of course

[mabster]

Interesting. Your stylesheet explicitly states that the font size is 11px, so if Mozilla handles it, it's doing it with a kludge.

Re:Why, my own of course

[kalislashdot]

I just did my first site with stylesheet font size. At first I set it to 12pt and then I noticed it did not resize. I hate that. Sometimes I crank the font size to the largest on slashdot and recline in my chair.

I found that if I use x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, etc. that then it can be resized. The hard part was matching the sizes. small = 12pt x-small = 10pt medium = 14pt. Try to use the keywords like that and it help your readers that like it smaller or larger.

And kudos and the good design and proper use of xhtml. If your not running the latest browser you should not be on the web so screw tables.

Re:Why, my own of course

[ottawanker]

The best way to take care of this problem while still allowing custom sizes and the ability to change the font size in the browser is to use ems instead of pts or pxs.

(Typical html type brackets replaced with ][)

An em is a unit of distance equal to the point size of a font. When used in stylesheets, an em refers to the size of the parent element.

P { font-size: 20pt }
B { font-size: 1.5em }

In the example any [B] text within the [P] tag would be 30 points, because the em is one and a half times the size of it's parent, the [P] tag.

You can still adjust the type size using browser preferences (which is important for those with impairedeyesight). Printed pages will have appropriate text size.

Re:Why, my own of course

[jhoffoss]

You should be specifying your fonts (and margins) using em's instead of px's. em's (in a compliant browser) will scale with the user's preference. And this works in IE too. Check westciv.com's CSS guide for more tips like this.

Re:Why, my own of course

[jhoffoss]

You also use bold instead of strong. Strong should be used in place of bold, and em in place of italics, as screen readers for the blind can interpret these tags and interpret the text appropriately. (Don't mean to nitpick, but as far as readability/design goes, these are things to look at to differentiate a good design from a great one. Incidentally, I do like the design of your site, for the most part.)

Gripe

[gehrehmee]

Off hand, I'd say that site's not all that hot. The site doesn't even vary its layout with the width of the window, which means it not only wastes most of the available space on my big monitor, but is completely useless on handleld displays.

I think we can set the bar a little higher than that don't you?

Re:Gripe

[missing000]

It's also not a website. W3C can't tell what it is, and a quick look at the source tells me it full of problems, numberone on my list being an extreeme over-use of javascript.

Re:Gripe

[aster_ken]

That is correct. It is not a site.

Mozilla 1.4b chokes on it. Opera is no better. Internet Explorer seems to me to be the only browser capable of rendering it correctly... Hmm... let's think about why... Maybe because they're using proprietary extensions? Yeah, that's it!

The design, while gimmicky (perfect word for it), is not all that useful. Clean designs can be found all over the Internet. Look at Princeton Financial's site: http://www.pfs.com/

As other posters have mentioned, the perfect site design seems to be Google's. Unfortunately, Google is a one-track thing - you search (or at least do something search related like Google Answers or Google Groups). For sites that require either a great deal more interactivity (sites for children and sites with lots of dynamic user-controllable content), that kind of design won't work. And for sites that are almost purely informational (shameless plug to our site - http://www.texasinjuryattorney.com/), menus, submenus, and in-line links seem to work good.

NOTE: I did not design that site. If I did, it would be better, because I am god-like in my abilities (or at least, that's what my ego tells me). ;)

Re:Gripe

[Tom7]

It works fine for me in Mozilla Firebird.

What's up with this "not a website" attitude? As much as the W3C would like to think it dictates web standards, there is a significant "de facto" standard of what works and what doesn't on web pages. It's perfectly possible to make a web site that essentially everyone can use without passing the W3C validator. That page might not be proper XHTML 4.0/CSS2/XML/RSS/WSDL compliant, but that doesn't make it not a web site! At the same time, you can easily make a proper standards-compliant document that is unviewable by any browser.

(Of course, if indeed this site doesn't work on many browsers, then that's not defensible. But it's still a website, just a broken one.)

Re:Gripe

[gl4ss]

ah, but it doesn't work on mozilla firebird correctly, at least i don't think the feature of having the middle of the page pretty much empty and the layout pretty much f*****d otherwise too.

but the biggest indicator would be that navigator bar, it gets fumbled when you scroll down.

could you say a car that didn't meet the requirements for a legal car is perfectly ok for a car?

or would you say a cripled 'enchanced cd' is a real compact disc?

Re:Gripe

[avi33]

I disagree, I think you jumped the gun a bit in your judgment.

The site dynamically re-allocates the content across multiple pages based on window height window and font size. (Small window = 'page 1 of 7', large window = page '1 of 2'). So, though it may not use your entire big monitor left-to-right, it does expand top-to-bottom, and redistribute the content across the appropriate number of pages. One great thing about the site is that all content is loaded in the first request, and if you click to the 'next page' or resize the window, resize the font (using the handy font++ buttons), it doesn't need to fetch anything more from the server.

Not only that, it still keeps the text in easily-readable, time-tested, newspaper style three column display, or a single long column (which would make it ideal for handhelds, I'd bet). Again, all without another fetch from the server.

Re:Gripe

[SeanAhern]

Internet Explorer seems to me to be the only browser capable of rendering it correctly...

I've enjoyed reading iht for a while now. When I see a news.google.com hit for it, I'll choose iht over other news sources, just because of the nice way it provides article reading.

And I'm doing this all in Mozilla 1.3.

Re:Gripe

[weave]

Doesn't work right in Safari either, so I guess none of the other KHTML browsers can deal with it either.

Re:Gripe

[iangoldby]

Internet Explorer seems to me to be the only browser capable of rendering it correctly...

It doesn't honour the user's font size preference in IE.

Re:Gripe

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because it uses a stylesheet in which the font size is set with a literal point size (i.e. 12pt) and not a relative size like you'd find in a plain HTML page or a stylesheet that uses relatives.

Re:Gripe

[gauthier-s]

I agree that w3c validator tells that is not a site but I don't agree with the point on javascript: Have you ever tried to obtain any client side interactivity without javascript? (omiting some tricks with css) I think that the International Herald Tribute sitehas a nice interface that let the user choose between columns or raw page presentation without server roundtrip, and that a feature I've never see elsewhere at this time, and it's uniquely due to their javascript implementation. The site is also readable in Netscape 4 with a really similar layout! (without any client side feature this time).

Re:Gripe

[Seth Finklestein]

The term "Compact Disc" is trademarked, so its owner (Philips) can insist that "Compact Discs" must conform to its standard.

The term "web site" is generic. There is no "legal requirement" for what constitutes a web site.

I win, you lose.

Clean Design?

[DarkBlack]

This site is broken in a very recent build of Mozilla Firebird. I find it horrid. I hate the floating bar at the top. There is no content in the middle area, probably because it doesn't validate.

I am very displeased with the website's designer. This is all before I have even had a chance to explore the rest of the site. Sorry, your 10 seconds is up. Next Link.....

Re:Clean Design?

[curious.corn]

Looks awful on Safari too! The text overflows and overlaps the footer and the headline too jumbles the beginning of the second column... lousy

Re:Clean Design?

[=weezer=]

I opened up IE to check it out, and the site looks quite nice on IE, especially the "story" pages (which feature some of the best "page turning" or column changing I've seen in a while). If this was re-done in proper coding I would be far more impressed, however. MozFirebird can't render it properly (the story pages work, however) and I imagine almost any other non-IE browser would struggle with it as well.

Cut down on the javascript and tables and then we'll talk =)

Re:Clean Design?

[avi33]

And it's a interface designer's problem if you use 'a very recent build' of a particular browser? I use moz 1.3 and I read iht all the time without incident.

While we're calling the kettle black, your own site only 'tentatively' validates as html 4.01.

Re:Clean Design?

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks exactly the same in Konqueror as it does in IE. Except for this message across the top "This site requires Javascript to be turned on."

Re:Clean Design?

[DarkBlack]

I don't know why you say 'tentatively', but it validates as HTML 4.01 strict , and if you visit with a compliant browser, that asks for xhtml 1.1, you are served xhtml 1.1 with a content-type of application/xhtml+xml. I'd welcome you to show me how it doesn't validate.

You probably saw html 4.01 content if you visted with konqueror, opera, or IE. Mozilla requests application/xhtml+xml as a higher priority than text/html.

Re:Clean Design?

[arvindn]

Same story here. That's got to be the worst website design I've come across in weeks. I seriously thought that calling it a clean and intuitive design was meant to be a joke, until I read the parent post.

Re:Clean Design?

[metamatic]

I'm using Mozilla 1.4b, and the IHT site looks like crap. Huge empty space in the middle, scroll right to read the text which is crammed into a column about three words wide.

Shocked at Doonesbury

[BrynM]

I was going to say the Doonesbury site, and even noticed that I was a bit behind reading them... Then I went there. (Microsoft's) Slate has taken it over! The site used to look like the white area without the Slate shit around it, but I guess MS felt that interface was too intuiti... err... not branded enough. First the subscription debacle of Non Sequitur and now this. Damn it!

ok, it's not really part of the internet...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but about:blank is nevertheless really, really clean.

Re:ok, it's not really part of the internet...

[satterth]

The really funny thing is, if you view the source of that page in IE you get

<HTML></HTML>

I would have expected cleaner

It's right here!

[SoCalChris]

http://games.slashdot.org

Re:It's right here!

[Anonymous Coward]

literally laughed out loud

Re:It's right here!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lucky I already finished the Starbuck's today, otherwise I would have been cleaning mocha off my monitor.

Re:It's right here!

[duffbeer703]

I love that easy to read neon purple color scheme... it puts any site to shame.

Re:It's right here!

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for laughs.. still laughing out loud..

Transmeta's site was nice

[PD]

Here's a mirror:

This web page is not here yet

Re:Transmeta's site was nice

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no tyops in this page.

Cleanest site design...

[Dr. Photo]

My nominee for best site design is Slashdot, but then again I'm completely colorblind... ;-)

Re:Cleanest site design...

[ljaguar]

Actually, for the longest time, i have been using slashdot in "light" mode (available under one of the preferences).

It's actually ultra-clean and very light. it's faster to download and render - it's still very usuable under lynx and i have for a while too. And it's pretty color agnostic. as in, just black on white. So give slashdot light a try.

Basically the table is not a monsterosity and the sidebars are missing. And you don't get the pretty topic icons.

Re:Cleanest site design...

[Fweeky]

It's still pretty rank; it's a mess of semantically meaningless tags like and , doesn't bother with any paragraphs (
everywhere), and is just generally nasty for what's supposed to be nice clean HTML aimed at textmode browsers and the like.

Just because it's written like a 1989 website, doesn't make it clean.

Re:Cleanest site design...

[override11]

ACKKKK!! Will everyone PLEASE stop talking about Lynx as if people still use it!!!

And if you are using it, get a clue! I have handhelds that can run Firebird or Ie just fine!
In all seriousness, I use the browser that takes the least time to open, and on a fresh install of XP Pro w/ swap file turned off and all patches applied, IE opens in a snap, so I will keep using it. :) Firebird is pretty close second as far as opening speed. Anyone else have a good graphical browser that is very very fast to open? Not fast for page renders, I just want the program up as soon as I hit the button!

Re:Cleanest site design...

[bjb]

Actually, I used to love the original "torn paper" look of Slashdot. Then CmdrTaco changed it to the way it looks today around Feb. 1998, I believe.

The "new" design does hold a lot more content, but I thought the aesthetics of the original were better.

Re:Cleanest site design...

[slaker]

NCSA Mosaic loads up pretty quickly on my XP3000+.

Oh, yeah. I still use lynx. I'm using it right now. Where I live, I can't get a modem to connect faster than 14.4kbps, and lynx is functional over that type of connection. Mozilla does OK, with its image permissions and blocking, if I need to look at graphics. I still do a lot of browsing with lynx.

Re:Cleanest site design...

[crucini]

ACKKKK!! Will everyone PLEASE stop talking about Lynx as if people still use it!!! And if you are using it, get a clue! I have handhelds that can run Firebird or Ie just fine!

I still use it. I'm posting this comment with lynx (and writing it in vi). Slashdot is a textual site and lynx is an efficient tool for handling it. I have no interest in the fonts or colors of a textual site - I'll pick my own damn font (misc-fixed) and color (green on black).

I probably use lynx for a greater percentage of my browsing than I did in 1995. That's because the web has become increasingly infested with putrid crap like unnecessary javascript and images. On the relatively innocent web of '95 I could afford to use Netscape; today the web is too choked with rubbish. The more clever the designers become with fonts, stylesheets, tables, etc. the more useful lynx becomes to bypass all that and just read the text.

I don't think you should assume that you have more clue than lynx users.

That menu...

[Anonymous Coward]

The menu on the International Herald Tribune site is a bit annoying. IMHO it's a few pixels larger than it needs to be; it could be 2/3 to 3/4 the thickness and still be fine. Not a huge problem though if you run at more than 1024x768. It does redraw horribly slow and annoyingly when you scroll, which is enough to make me want to turn it off (no obvious way to do that though). My main problem with it is that there's no reason to constantly have it at the top of the window. It's just not used enough to justify the screen space it uses and the epileptic seizures it induces when you scroll.

That's easy.

[Glytch]

That would have to be these folks.

Re:That's easy.

[bedessen]

Are you f*cking kidding me? I loathe their design. I assume you mean their regular pages, not the "we were slashdotted, so go away" temporary site.

Let's see: they list the page numbers in a big long list of numbers, with no next or previous button anywhere. Worse, they've decided that links shouldn't be underlined (even though that's a usability no-no), and to add insult to injury the link color is dark blue and the text color is black. In other words, to flip pages, you first have to determine which page you're currently on by picking out the ONE black (nonlinked) page number in a long list of dark blue page numbers (the rest of the pages.)

Add to that the fact that the search is a piece of crap, you can really only search on one term. So if you're looking for Dark Angel episodes, you'd better search on "dark" or "angel" but heavens not "dark angel."

There's no way to see more than 20 results on one page. It would help out their server load if you could see more on one page, with less page flipping.

Torrentse is a neat page but it's about as far away from what I'd call good design or good usability.

Re:That's easy.

[Glytch]

No, I meant the temporary pages. You know, as a double-joke on not only is their new design simple and clean, but also on how their new design is a result of recent linking from the same site I linked from. (Foghorn Leghorn voice) It's a joke, ah say, a joke, son.

Wall Street Journal

[thefirelane]

Allthough you might not be able to read the articles, th entire site, including the free font page, has a very clean and elegant design... http://www.wsj.com ---Lane

Here's an amazing site...

[knightwolf]

Here's one that has some of the cleanest design and interface concepts, as well as low bandwidth support that I've seen: ccosas beanbagcentral site

The whole beanbagcentral.com website is really impressive.

Either way, I vote for well managed color coordination, easy display of commonly used information, not a bandwidth hog, and relative content.

Keep in mind though - how good a site depends on the purpose of a site. It's all a matter of the design, intent, target audience, etc. What may seem like a bad design to some viewers may merely be a website targetted for an entirely different market or purpose. Look for example at news sites. They're horribly cluttered, but they do display at a glance all the most important news. Now, I do have to say news.goolge.com absolutely wins for clean, relavant, and intelligent content. But, it's not CREATING, it's merely caching the creation of other websites.

My Opinion

[MooseGuy529]

Well I would say one site that has a very clean design is Slashdot in Light mode, but I guess that doesn't really count... I haven't really run in to any really easy to use sites lately.

First, a site has to look decent, color- and font-wise. A standard font like arial or times is good, and the colors can't clash. Also, the font, color, size, et cetera has to be consistent throught the page, i.e. if there are topic headings make them all the same style. The place I have seen this most ignored is in small e-shops where they have links and pictures and huge headings everywhere.

Next: navigatino has to be easy and structured, but not overstructured--it's a balance. If you have just a pile of pages without organization, it's really hard to find stuff, but (as it sometimes happens with large directories like Yahoo and Google) grouping under too many levels gives vague top-level headings that don't really reveal what's beneath.

Another random thing that popped into my head: if the main content of a site is articles, then the navbar should have a bunch of categories for articles. It's really annoying when I see something like Home, About Us, Articles, Polls, Members, Forums, Help, Log In and I go to several places looking for stuff when all the main content is under one heading; in other words, keep the sections balanced.

Use stylesheets... it's really annoying to see crappy web pages with different fonts and colors, or mistakes in markup because the writer was typing out font tags. I saw a web site the other day that had font tags around each and every link on the page to give links a different color... um, there's an easier way to do it!

Don't add pointless features. Nobody really wants to vote on which picture of your cat is the best (sorry, a classic of vanity web pages) or sign your pointless guestbook. When you use one of those stupid web-page wizards, put a little thought into whether you really need each feature you want to add...

More about stylesheets... This is hard for already-created sites, but lay out and format the bulk of your site with CSS so it can be resized, stretched, and twisted without looking stupid. Make sure changing the font size doesn't ruin your layout, and also that you can change the font size--don't use pixel sizes!

Okay, I'm done ranting...

Right points, wrong order

[mcgroarty]

The author of the article has a good list of what makes a site good, but needs to swap his first and last items.

The same damned thing's true of most web designers.

I submit:

[Anonymous Coward]

&nbsp;
</html>

Viewed in Lynx always looked pretty clean to me.

Apple?

[sockit2me9000]

Apple has the most intuitive company webpage I've seen in a long while. You are never more then three clicks away from information. Their new store, on the other hand, is much less intuitive than it used to be. I'm not sure why they changed it into the more cluttered interface. Look at Dell's page, or Compaq, or Sun... icky.

IHT on OS X

[xyrw]

A nice touch is the pinstripe background when you visit it on OS X.

How about other operating systems? Does it tailor its appearance to them too?

Re:IHT on OS X

[darc]

No, it's pinstriped... Everywhere.

Ha'ayal and Fisheye

[epsalon]

These Hebrew sites employ a very clean and easy forum system, unseen anywhere else.

Easy for basic functionality

[dszd0g]

Don't get me wrong, google is my favorite search engine. I just don't think they deserve any awards for Web page design.

The basic features of google are easy to access, but there are a whole bunch of google features that are not available from their main page. Google has their own features page (try getting to that from the front page), but there are all sorts of third party Web pages explaining some of the "hidden" features of google. Their "Advanced search" really does not offer many of their features. A better Web page design would have a link on the front page to all their other features. Some Web sites off a site map, but I have not found one for Google.

A good user interface makes the basic functionality easy to use: google does this. But also makes the advanced functionality easy to find for those who want it: google does not do this.

Re:Easy for basic functionality

[the uNF cola]

But.. but.. they have 5 main features anyone would want. Everything else is in their business section, which is what anyone else WOULD want.

All in all, it's a pretty good interface. Even their advanced forms are easy to use.

Re:Easy for basic functionality

[GeorgeH]

I believe the poster is referring to the kind of advanced features that required writing an entire book on the subject.

Re:Easy for basic functionality

[jhoffoss]

Uh, the book is titled "Google Hacks" which to some might imply that those abilities were not necessarily by design. (I haven't read the book, so I can't comment first hand on whether this is the case.)

Re:Easy for basic functionality

[jhoffoss]

First to get there, click "jobs, press & help" and second item down in the middle of the page is "Google Web Search Features."

Second, most of those features show up automatically, which you will come across when you use Google frequently. Granted, the address search feature isn't very obvious, but I've still had google ask if I wanted directions when searching for cities. The spelling corrections show up if you misspell something, the news items when there is current and relevant news, similar pages and cached items show up beneath every searched item, etc. They don't advertise those features, but I disagree in that I believe the features are designed well in that you don't need to do anything to use them, apart from know they exist.

minimalist but good

[(a*2) (ron)]

Most sites designed by 37signals are pretty good.

Re:minimalist but good

[Anonymous Coward]

people are still wasting that much money on web pages....hahahahahaha

Zombo.com

[xagon7]

By an dlarge the BEST site design I have EVER seen. The though, effort, and creativity involved in this masterpiece has to been experienced, not just seen.

Re:Zombo.com

[Enrico Pulatzo]

I concur, for a site that makes anything possible, zombo is free of clutter. The fusion of form and function. Truly awesome. Too bad it's down right now, or you could see for yourself.

Ego thing?

[rikkus-x]

Best website design? I'd have to say my own, and claim it's not an ego thing. Honest. If you can't find it, I'm glad you didn't visit.

Re:Ego thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel like I'm back in the gopher days!

But seriously, not bad. Simple is always best.

Animeigo

[Hungus]

I have to say that Robert has put together a clean site for your anime needs at Animeigo East yo maneuver, easy to find information and works on all my browsers without a fault.

if you want to evaluate web sites

[Anonymous Coward]

The easiest way I find to evaluate web design is to not use my main computer.

I have a real old macintosh laptop (68040, 640x480 grayscale), and with it you can instantly tell good web design: everything fits on the screen without being scrunched, and it doesn't burn five minutes of cpu (literally) to render a page full of tables and obtuse formatting. Also don't have pesky things like flash to worry about.

Now in this context, I'm equating speed + clean == desirable. Some people don't feel that way, but I surf the internet to read web pages, not watch the machine freeze up as a page loads.

Good designed page? http://www.icab.de

Bad designed page? http://www.slashdot.org (and thus guaranteeing my -1 status). Just try and read it in full mode with 640x480 screen resolution. Turn on light mode and too much information is lost. Read an article in which more than 20 replies appear and the table formatting will drive the rendering engine insane.

Another bad design (to be fair): http://groups.yahoo.com . Yahoo, which used to pioneer the "serve a different web page with the same content depending on your browsers capability" manages to scrunge message subject lines into a width 8 characters wide in order to get their stupid ads and toolbars on the left and right sides of the screen.

Fast computers and fast video cards have allowed web designers to become sloppy.

Plus, use a Mac (or at least SOMETHING different than what you design with) will show all your faults in javascript that turn out to be "oops" non-portables.

Jodi

[Tom7]

The best: jodi.org .

Re:Jodi

[erpbridge]

You forgot to mention Zombo.com

Nope, its a firebird bug

[metalhed77]

The content is there. You have to hit refresh and firebird fixes itself. Sometimes firebird omits chunks of content randomly. Does it on my XHTML valid blog to.

The man knows his html...

[crapulent]

Come on, the timecube guy is obviously a master at modern UI deign and html layout. :-)

Seriously though, here are some sites whose design I like:

Sweetcode

Mathworld

openrbl.org

perldoc

Paul Borke's website

the Joel On Software forums

the Tech Report (a debatable choice, but the best of its type)

Dmitry's Design Lab

Re:The man knows his html...

[pjkundert]

This woman does, too:

http://www.qbi.ca

OK, I'm biased; my wife built this site...

games

[inflexion]

I vote for the slashdot games section.

noticed the same thing

[zogger]

but mines color, an old 280c Powerbook. Run iCab on it, go surfing, real easy to see clean design or not.

Only thing I don't like about it is no dock, means its a pain to do stuff with it sometimes.

The older PBs are nice, finding batteries? Ha! They cost a lot more than the machines themselves.

I always wonderd WHY laptop makers just couldn't use D cells or C cells, nicads maybe, so you could replace them at any hardware / department store. That propietary, every size in the universe, nothing matches much with anything else deal is for teh sucks.

Nothing else compares...

[falcon203e]

Without a doubt Apple has the nicest site on the planet. The layout of the product pages, the hotnews site, the front page, everything.

WARNING: The preceeding message contains biased opinions.

Everyone knows that Jeff. K's Web site

[Mordant]

is the best.

how about some judging criteria:

[avi33]

First of all, it can't use javascript, because anything that can't be displayed on my 1984 casio digital watch (running slackware via the CLI) isn't really a website anyway. Same goes for tables, XML, pixel gifs, images that use more than 8 bits of color, and true type fonts, though CSS and a DTD are mandatory.

And secondly, it's got to look good running at 64 x 48 pixels. Some people need to look at their monitors from the next room using an inverted pair of binoculars.

Finally, under no circumstances shall you take into consideration the content being displayed. My blog (dedicated to the daily minutiae of my plants and their arcing patterns toward sunlight) easily satisfies all of these requirements, so why shouldn't a consumer-oriented, dynamic, international news site be able to do it too?

Re:how about some judging criteria:

[isorox]

but usmull.com has javascript

Re:how about some judging criteria:

[198348726583297634]

I don't think it can be emphasized enough:

I WANT INFORMATION

Wait.. since we missed it the first time.

I WANT INFORMATION

And, because flash-oriented sites are so hard to navigate from way up on this high-horse of mine..

I WANT INFORMATION

There..do I get my complimentary copy of "Learn snobbery in 21 days"?

Drudge Report

[zogger]

Clean, really simple, very successful, text and a very few images. Works on ancient computers fine, so I imagine ya'all with barnburners it must render as instantly as your eyeballs can adjust. Good business plan, and actually a useful site. No matter what machine or OS over the years I've looked at it with, it's always quite readable. And if you go to his dad's site, linked from there, called refdesk, again, similar, quite useful, very simple, gets the job done.

worst page evar was I think my second or third shot at a page, using netscape composer (gold) and their polkadot background colorand some fairly strange link color and text color combos.

HAHAHAHA I'm mostly colorblind, my girlfriend looked at it, told me she would move out, shave her head, change her name, and join a convent if I ever put it on the web, just so the universal dissin' cooties I would get from it wouldn't stick to her.

Good designed sites IMO

[jpsowin]

I actually keep a bookmark of some sites that I think are well-designed/inspirational. Here are a few:

Mediatemple
Neostream Interactive
Become Interactive
Slashdot: Games (I'm sorry, I'm just kidding, but who designed this??)

...oh, and just about anything Ceonex designed (not everything, but they are very good).

Re:Clean Design? - Not for Safari

[JamMasterJGorilla]

Still Broken an all the Safari builds.....
I've personally submitted the screen shots several times.. and I've seen where other Safari user's have complained.
I do like the site and the content is good. But my current browser chooses to censor my available reading material... Is it an Apple plot?

odd todd of course :)

[BigBir3d]

oddtodd.com

Timecube is the greatest!

[tedDancin]

Timecube.com confirms to the following standards:

• Correct and proper use of the tag
• Good conformity to "Accessiblility Standards", using nothing smaller than +3 fonts.
• Proper use of the underline tag, with no associated link.
• Line drawings compressed in JPEG format.
• Contains insightful phrases, such as "CREATION HAS TWO SEX POLES & 4 CORNER RACES OF HUMANS". I'm not touching that with a 10ft, err, pole.

Man, so much talk about cubes and 4x4's. Obviously created by a frustrated SUV driver. :P

books

[oyenstikker]

Websites should read like books. The content should get most of the space, with a bit on the top of the page for the title and chapter, a bit on the bottom for location (page number), and a bit on the side for navigation (ala tabs in a book). The front page (cover) should be easy to get to and give the basic information. The back cover should also be easy to get to, and give information such as publisher and contact information. Images not adding to content should be scarce.

Unclean Sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Ewwwhhh.. I hate that website! It won't render properly on a lot of browsers and the multiple columns are a pain to read online. It's fine for paper print but not on a video screen. The fonts are nice and the page layout is nice but it's all based on offline paper layouts. Far too much JavaScript is being used and the NAV tools are confusing.

Here's a list of problems I have with most sites, especially news sites:

1. Three column layouts that don't stretch with browser width. Most of them are built for 640x480 or 800x600 which is fine but I haven't run at that low a resolution in years. At least allow your pages to scale width-wise!

2. Tons of top and sidebar banner ads that blink and change frequently. It's distracting and annoying.

3. Pop-ups/unders are a pain. This alone drove me to Mozilla which is great by the way!

4. Sites that are annoying but double-so because they don't offer a "Print Page" option. You know, the one that reformats the article for easy online reading or printing. If the link is there, I click it before I even read an article.

5. Flash ads in the middle of the paragraph. This is a pain in the neck! I've love to disable the flash plugin for a given website now and then. I'd rather look at a blank box with a puzzle piece then to see fluid motion ads that I can't stop in the middle of the document.

We've got to come up with a new way to pay for the web without relying on advertising or subscriptions. Or just get rid of all the graphics and go back to what Mosaic looked like prior to the tags polluted everything.

I really have little need for graphics on web pages unless it's a photo-album. Kinda like the abuse MS introduced with MS Word. Used to be people would put effort into writing properly. Now all they do is use fonts the wrong way and make gaudy documents while their writing skills go to pot.

Let's leave the page layout and graphics design to the experts and stop doing it just because we can.

Makes me want to go learn LaTeX and write an editor that's better then Lyx and let folks get back to writing and stop worrying about page layout and styles.

Stick to the standards, and make it snappy

[Malcolm Scott]

It would be great if more people designed sites properly, using CSS to keep formatting separate from content, keeping page size to a minimum, using URLs that won't change, etc... I'd like to think that a web-based document-management system I designed would fit into this category - although it's far from perfect, I'd like to think I was making one step towards a better World Wide Web. I think the Gentoo Linux site is also a very well-designed site, and another great example to the rest of the Net - I'm never lost there, despite the huge amount of info on the site.

Off the top of my head:

[Fweeky]

• aagh.net -- degrades gracefully, uses real (X)HTML properly, has clean URL's, simple and clear navigation, plenty of <link>'s, and is one of the few sites I know of that not only serves XHTML as application/xhtml+xml as it should be, but serves HTML 4.01 to clients that don't support it. Yes, it's my site ;)
• xiven.com -- honourable mention :)
• diveintomark.org -- aside from the braindead US date format he uses, it rules.
• DevEdge -- clean, degrades very well.
• kuro5hin -- Has a nice fresh creamy flavour.

might be clean, but not in Safari

[hrbrmstr]

I don't know whether it's a standards problem with the Safari rendering engine, but this story: http://www.iht.com/articles/96772.html from their site doesn't render well enough to read at all in Safari (latest, patched beta).

It looked OK in Firebird (the browser, not the DB), tho. I like the attention to detail regarding spacing in the articles, but the main page just made me want to do anything but surf further on their site.

news sites seem the best

[kootch]

Seems that large-audience, or atleast focussed audience, news sites are the best in terms of interface design and general usability

my two favorites:

NewsToday
BBC's main site

self-serving bastard commenting

[f64]

easy navigation is my aim; don't know if i've succeded with this one .

i guess this might be somewhat off topic since my site is nothing compared to high-traffic info-packed sites like www.bbc.com

Re:self-serving bastard commenting

[shepd]

Perhaps you're clicking the wrong BBC link then?

This one is MUCH nicer.

Marshall Electronics / Mogami Cable

[Myself]

I came across Marshall Electronics while looking for miniature cameras and immediately fell in love with their site. It's packed with technical info, easy to navigate, and uncluttered. I wrote their webmaster a thankyou note. These are also the folks responsible for Mogami cable and connectors.

Clean news sites

[WIAKywbfatw]

Personally, I think that the BBC News and NewsNow sites are both well layed out, work well, etc. Skimming either can be done in seconds and give you a good snapshot of what's going on in the world.

Drilling down to an area of interest on either site is very clean, quick and easy too.

My vote goes to...

[MrResistor]

McMaster-Carr

At first glance many will disagree, and likely every one of them will have no experience with McMaster-Carr. The thing you have to realize is that their printed catalog is about 3500 pages, and they stock over 400,000 items, and this site incorporates all that and more. I have to say this is hands down the most usable e-commerce site I've ever had to deal with, putting many sites with far fewer items to shame.

Re:My vote goes to...

[mhesseltine]

MrResistor said:

At first glance many will disagree, and likely every one of them will have no experience with McMaster-Carr. The thing you have to realize is that their printed catalog is about 3500 pages, and they stock over 400,000 items, and this site incorporates all that and more. I have to say this is hands down the most usable e-commerce site I've ever had to deal with, putting many sites with far fewer items to shame.

To which I say, "Amen brother!"

For those who want a comparison to an industrial supplier who has a not so intuitive website, Manhattan Supply Company

McMaster may sell some items at a higher price, but the ease of finding those items makes the price more than worthwhile.

Re:My vote goes to...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just checked this out. Pretty incredible how the search tries to anticipate what you're looking for, and then displays matching catalog pages, with pictures. If you're reading this post, visit the site and use the search feature.

clean

[Ry R.]

I've always liked Kottke.org, though it looks way better on a Mac I think than on Windows

themorningnews.org is nice too

webpagesthatsuck.com

[schnits0r]

They offer tips on how to fix thing and how not to make annoying sites. I find it best to learn by example. They show bad examples so you know what NOT to do.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com

NOOOOOOO!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Websites should read like books.

But the thing is, web users don't read web sites like books.

Look at the usability research, and a few things are clear. Most web sites are scanned, not read. (The exceptions are things like lengthy articles, but even then, many of these are printed and read from paper anyway.) Hence writing in the same style, and offering the same "mass of text" presentation, as would be appropriate for a book is bad practice for the web.

Most users do not scroll much, if at all. Two of the most used features of the web browsing world are the back button and sites' search facilities, neither of which has a real equivalent in the physical, book-reading world. Books have to have a "one size fits all" approach, while web sites can interact and adapt.

While I take your point about content being dominant, web sites really shouldn't read like books for a whole host of good reasons.

Anatomy of failure: What Killed FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The End of FreeBSD

[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]

When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.

Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.

FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.

It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.

So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.

Discussion

I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.

From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.

There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.

Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.

Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?

Shouts

To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.

To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It

Totally agree

[GCP]

Slashdot's search is so unhelpful that I never consider using it. Go ahead and mod me down for "redundant", but it's worth it to make the point that this poster isn't alone in this opinion.

Blender's designer, and others

[digitect]

I've been liking this guy's stuff lately. He did the Blender3D site, and if you follow the links, some others that have a similar look. Just clean color bars with a nice asymetric balance, navigation is integral to the design, not just patched into some corner block some where.

Chris Croome (hi dude!) had a role in the WebArchitects page which IMO is the right way to do a text-only approach... let color do the work, not graphics.

Finally, my own Cream for Vim page is a monochromatic (single hue) design in a text-only approach. It uses a simple sidebar positive/negative design, which is not only easy to read, but very easy to maintain.

I can't believe nobody has said...

[stagmeister]

... Homestar Runenr!!!

This website has such a great interface. It has sound, it has one simply Flash object, it is actually funny, and it's so easy to use that my parents can figure it out!

MY EYES AHHHHHH THE BURNING!

[ogre2112]

E-frigging-gads! EGADS I say!

My god get me a rag my eyes are bleeding!

Financial Times (German Edition)

[hughk]

When the FT decided to produce a German language edition, they kept the distinctive colour, but made a much more interesting paper, presenting complex information simply.

When they did the web site for the German edition, they carried on with the new graphic design producing one that seems better than their English language site. Even if you are a non German-language speaker, I would reccomend a visit just to look at the design. As a side note, the FT as a newspaper is never big on pictures and the web site carries on with that tradition.

Interestingly enough, the site remains free for the time being.

Maybe your build is broken?

[Inoshiro]

I'm using Moz 1.3. The floating bar is an annoyance, but I'm sure they could set a prefs cookie to leave it pinned (assuming they bothered to research it). In a way, though, it's handy to have, since it's always there without scrolling being required. If Moz's repaints weren't so slow, it'd be much cooler.

They don't underline their links, which should be a crime -- we're not all awesome at seeing the difference between colours, especially as our eyes age or if we're unlucky enough to be colour blind.

Oh, and they tickle the Moz font spacing EM bug. Basically, text will overlap if they use em spacing in the CSS because Mozilla's still broken in big ways internally. For someone like me who turns the fonts waaay up (I like a mix of readability and high fidelity), it's very annoying. But again, that's a browser bug.

Re:Maybe your build is broken?

[DarkBlack]

As someone mentioned earlier, it probably is a Mozilla Firebird bug in the quirks mode rendering. It renders fine in Mozilla 1.3. However as some others have stated already, it's not valid html or anything else except tag soup.

Not quite.

[Inoshiro]

While K5's not as bad as it used to be, Rusty still hasn't updated the site to NOT use the FrankenHTML that works on NS 4.x. I know that some people consider Mozilla bad in this day and age, but anything beats Netscape 4.x.

Unfortunately, not everyone sees it this way, and Rusty's not about to cut off the readership.

Re:Not quite.

[Fweeky]

Um, yes.. I was going to mention the bitter aftertaste from that, but forgot when I rewrote my comment. Bah :)

It does at least look quite nice and clean, anyway ;)

I can tell what's not...

[Zugok]

www.icq.com

*shudder* I still can't navigate thru that place.

php.net?

[h3]

I've always admired the design of php.net. Maybe it's because I spend so much time there (the manual) and I've grown used to it, but I find it easy to navigate and read. On top of the straight design stuff, they also have a lot of neat "features" that really add to the site design:

• Smart URLs (http://www.php.net/echo will take you to the "echo" manual page)
• Smart 404s - mistype a URL and it'll essentially perform a search instead and come up with suggestions
• "view source", as in view the PHP source that generated the page, anywhere.
• ACCESSKEYs used liberally in the HTML to ease keyboard navigation
• Intelligent language accomodations - urls all have the language code so it's obvious and simple to switch languages. Plus, you can cookie your preferred language.

There's probably lots of stuff I've forgotten or don't know about, but to me it seems clear that the PHP folks take their website seriously and have spent considerable time improving usability.

A couple of neat links:

• http://www.php.net/tips.php
• http://www.php.net/urlhowto.php

-h3

Standards compliance, damn it!

[zonix]

Geez, forget clean "design"!

I'd settle for standards compliant sites. If you start there, it's harder to screw up your precious "design", unless tempted by using flash and javascript, and the like.

People, your next stop is the W3C.

z

eehm...

[i chose quality]

had to read that post a few times...

still, i have no idea, what site you are talking about.

can someone please fill me in?

Editors, hear me !

[forged]

Here's a search.pl for you :-)

<!-- Search Google -->
<FORM method=GET action=http://www.google.com/custom>
<INPUT TYPE=text name=q size=31 maxlength=255 value="">
<INPUT type=submit name=sa VALUE="Google Search">
<INPUT type=hidden name=cof VALUE="LW:275;L:http://images.slashdot.org/title.g if;LH:72;AH:left;S:http://slashdot.org/;AWFID:528b aeba264afd9b;">
<input type=hidden name=domains value="slashdot.org">
<input type=hidden name=sitesearch value="slashdot.org">
</FORM>
<!-- Search Google -->

the Drudge Report

[zogger]

It's a fairly long running internet news site, an early portal. Run by reporter Matt Drudge, who also does a radio show on sunday nights. Pretty successful, even though it would be considered very plain in appearance, uses simple basic code. I don't recall exactly but it has a tremendous hit count. Drudge is (in)famous for a few decent scoops, one I recall was breaking the clinton/monica lewinsky story. He gets a lot of leaked insider info, I would roughly classify him along the lines of a Jack Anderson style reporting, if you remember him, an earlier (but still active just slowing down) muck raker/expose style reporter.

full url:

http://www.drudgereport.com/

Drudge Report

OK this sounds strange, but ...

[nbvb]

This page:

http://www.accessdmv.com/

is fantastic. Clean, simple, gets to the point. Lets me renew my car registration in (literally) 45 seconds. Love it.

I _love_ simple, mid-90's-era web pages. I haven't updated it in a while, but my page:

www.osxadm.com

is just like that. You can read it, some simple icons, but no fluff. In fact, at one point osxadm inspired this guy's page:
bowdenj (hey, someone noticed!)

Apple.com

[hexdcml]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Apple.com It's clean, simple to use, with lot's of content - compared to Microsoft's website, this is a lot better, and I've read somewhere it reflects Apple's philosophy's or what have you... but I just think it's a really cool site - and Apple being my online Mecca, I visit it daily and never seem to tire from it.

excellent html tags and css use on this site!

[gauthier-s]

Cinnamon

the IE frontend of this one is incredible

[gauthier-s]

Somes may say that it overuse javascript: YoungPup
It's also a great javascript reference
The interface is diferent with other user agents

mobile.de

[Anonymous Coward]

In Germany: mobile.de.

They also have an English version.

Text-based design

[selan]

Have a look here for a minimalist, clean approach.

It's not table-less at all!

[Anonymous Coward]

Click on any of the forum links and it will take you to a PHPbb full of tables. Also, you didn't write PHPbb so how can you take credit for it's cleaness?

I don't know what I like about it

[Anonymous Coward]

... but of all the financial sites I visit (credit cards, banks, stockbrokerages, investment banks), by far the most pleasant to work with is http://www.vanguard.com . I'm missing the part of the brain that lets me analyze why I like it so much, but it just seems to really work for me.

Homestar Runner is a good FLASH site, that's it.

[Maul]

Homestar Runner is a great example of a good flash site. Unfortunately it is also a great example of a site that you can't do anything at unless you download a plugin and wait for the cartoons to load. This is 100% fine for a site like Homestar Runner, which is a cartoon-based site. It would not be a good design for a news page.

The challenge when making a web page that a lot of "pro" designers don't understand it seems, is that you need to pick a design that works with the content on your site. In many cases, the site layout might be very pretty, but gets in the way of the information being presented.

Non-English Sites are also good !

[ktnagel]

Look at Telepolis, or at the german bamboo site, and loads of others in yet other languages. Thomas Nagel

Oboy !

[jefu]

The International Herald Tribune site looks pretty good to me on phoenix (0.6) (er, um Mozilla/Firebird - maybe we should just all call it MF). On the other hand it does not use all the width of the browser and resizing the window to be smaller than the text given just hides it.

One of the news articles on the HT front page prompted me to look at the UN page which is worth looking at for a good example of how not to build a page : the UN english page . All the text on the page is in the form of images - usually a sign that the designer has not a clue. (The source says it was done with Adobe GoLive.)

For a good page I'd suggest Arts and Letters Daily which presents a lot of information in a nicely usable format. I would prefer that their banner image be just a tad smaller though. The stuff at the foot is also a bit annoying (expecially the hitbox crap) and not well laid out - but I rarely get that far down.

And if I might indulge my own amusement for a bit I'd recommend my personal webpage as being almost completely unusable. Odd javascript. No navigation. Big (oddly unusable and quite awful) image of me. General overboard hackiness. Serious dependencies on browsers. Here Ya Go

I nominate

[slaker]

about:blank

Looks clean in every browser I've tried, except lynx. :(

The people who run the ICQ homepage should be shot. mirabilis.com looks like about four normal web sites threw up on it. Same thing with the large group of sites associated with voyeurweb.com. Their web designer needs to be beaten to death with a 14" dildo.

Also, a lot of sites use flash or something similar to get to a "clean" design. I'm on a super-low-speed connection, and know well the pain of having to wait 25 minutes while some fuckwit's version of the Sistine Chapel tries to load on my machine so I can see the flash-only navigation to download a driver. For those people, I'd offer that they be forced to watch while their wives and children are beaten for the duration of time it takes to load their pages over a 14.4 connection. With a 14" dildo.

CSS

[jefu]

For a nicely impressive look at what CSS can go for you try the Zen Garden of CSS.

Designer is the operative word

[jefu]

Thats because for the most part they are "Designers" with a "Designer" background.

The Designer (turned out in the thousands by "Design Schools" or art programs and the like) :

1. Aspires to be doing ads and layouts for Wired and Interview and the like.
2. Or perhaps is really an Artist who is Unappreciated by the Great Unwashed.
3. Considers web design to be something kind of icky and (they hope) temporary - but for which they should get paid quite a lot.
4. Is not interested in readability or usability, only in the right artistic feel.
5. Is not interested in how long it takes to load or anything else technical or computer geeky.
6. Is contemptuous of anyone who doesn't immediately understand why their website is compelling, important and wonderful. (See item 2)
7. Often requires several plugins for the "full effect". Feels that you must download (even pay for) that plugin to be worthy of their talent.
8. Knows that everyone is missing out by not having heard the latest song "Foo and Bar" by the Metasyntatic Variables, so includes it in wav format with every page on their site.
9. Believes everyone should be using a monitor like theirs - 32 bit color, 2000 by 2000 pixels. And have a good sound system attached to their computer.

here's a clean one..

[tytanic11]

http://tardblog.com

Re:Standards compliance, [bleep] it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, no! Don't DDoS the W3C site!

Wouldn't that be sad?

MEMIGO

[Anonymous Coward]

Clean site, presents a lot of content at once, adapts to your experience-level (new users get contextual help items).

http://memigo.com

BLOW-UP

[anythings-possible-b]

18:12 21/5/2546

TOPIC: BLOW-UP

i saved the html index file to my harddisk it's 68 kb.
i copied the data (e.g. words,number) i get 5.48 kb.

WOAH that's 8.05% for ... ?

since i'm working for a big DATA-carring-network (lying) i would give them a A+.
what a good custumor!

maybe the CERN, you know the guys who invented the WEB, are secretly getting a few percent from every "byte-html" people are downloading?
-or-
they invented HTML so people and comapnies are forced to up-grade their network to download mega-blown-up html code, so the cern guys-and-girls can finally send around their useless "let-u-make-a-short" bullshitdata ...
and just to hide the fact some more they rename it W3C.

plain-text forever, png for-ever.

sorry for the flame.

the cleanest design

[VanillaCoke420]

http://www.something.com

about:blank

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, clean, loads fast, handicap accesible, w3c complient...

dot dot dot

[stevejsmith]

Nice site, but what stuck out on the site was this. Just read the first paragraph. 4.9 people a year from smoking? Looks like they've already achieved their goal

Check out any sites by the web firm '37signals'

[MeepMeep]

I remember their sites being quite excellent. Bit of an 'Apple' feel, very clean and usable.

http://www.37signals.com

trimMail.com

[Anonymous Coward]

trimMail: Clean, easy to use, and only three graphics on the entire site.

Drawbacks: uses tables instead of css for layout.

don't kill me

[Anonymous Coward]

at work here, we run win2000 server and spend a lot of time on MSDN and i have to say the redesigned site is not as atrocious as it once was

in terms of usability though, amazon has every one beat, including google...

What about philip.greenspun.com?

[tyroneking]

It's so wondefully clear, with no menus and several interesting photos ;)

Pixel sizes

[MacGod]

don't use pixel sizes!

Well, pixel sizes are often a more consistent way to do the layout. The biggest problem is that Mac web browsers generally assume that the screen is 72dpi, while Windoze assumes 96dpi. I don't know about Linux.

The end result is that stuff designed with point sizes on a Windoze machine ends up reallytiny on my Mac!

Pixel sizes overcome this

Re:Pixel sizes

[MooseGuy529]

So make a CSS layout that doesn't fall apart and then use font-size: xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large CSS properties. To specify the size of things on the page, use a percentage of the total width, i.e. make a nav bar 10% of the width of the page. It's a lot easier and looks better at odd sizes!

Don't forget Suze!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.suze.net - easy to navigate, with pr0n always close by...

Page numbers?

[crucini]

Why burden the web with page numbers? They're an artifact of a different technology. If you have a big document, make it available in one page. Then, if convenient, make it available broken down by natural units like chapters and sections.

Information

[crucini]

I WANT INFORMATION

I think the canonical reply is You won't get it.