Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
These Hebrew sites employ a very clean and easy forum system, unseen anywhere else.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
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.
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.
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
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/
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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
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