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

[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

[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.

Without a doubt

[Loosewire]

Google - even their ads are clean and not obtrusive.

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?

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.....

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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