Patterns for Personal Web Sites

July 29, 2010 9:32 AM

Patterns for Personal Web Sites, a guide from 2002-2003 on making best-of-the-web personal sites.

Give a gift to the community, which may be extra fun if it's a secret garden. Though some details are dated, it would be a better web if everyone followed the advice on content, structure, time, navigation, and technology.

posted by domnit (25 comments total)

everyone more folks
posted by domnit at 9:36 AM on July 29, 2010

Though some details are dated

Site design by Jakob Neilson.

Though really, TBH, nothing all that much has changed in web design since 2003. The code is a little more elegant, people are is inclined to do wacky nonstandard things with navigation, the blog format is a little more formalised, that's about it that I can think of.
posted by Artw at 9:36 AM on July 29, 2010

Site maps seem to have pretty much disappeared.
posted by Artw at 9:42 AM on July 29, 2010

Folks are more likely to just throw their corn husks away than compost 'em, and I don't mean in the trash neither, I mean right on the floor, out the winder, off their motorcycles. Time was everyone knew who you was and the company you kept just by yer own rights and what you was willing to talk about, and there was a craft to it, but now there ain't nothing but corn husks everywheres, and everyone in everyone's business, and dangit the world today just ain't clean or fittin' enough for an honest person to do themselves an honest-to-goodness day's bloggin'.
posted by swift at 10:01 AM on July 29, 2010 [8 favorites]

For a site going on 7 years old the advice is still pretty good. I wish more people designing corporate sites would follow it. The number of times I hit a science supply site trying to find product info only to be met wirh crap navigation, useless search, and complete lack of content makes me wonder how the company manages to sell anything. If all you can tell me is "Yes, we have this, for this much money" but give me zero additional details (MSDS, product info, availability, references in literature, protocols, etc.) then guess what? I'm going to buy from your competitor.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:02 AM on July 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

For a guy obsessed with usability, Jakob Nielsen sure has an awful website. Among other things, the line-spacing (or lack thereof) makes it appear as a solid block of text.
posted by schmod at 10:13 AM on July 29, 2010 [4 favorites]

If all you can tell me is "Yes, we have this, for this much money"

Be grateful for what you got, is what I'm saying.

(My laugh is the hollow laugh of someone who's tried to just get a price for various conservation supplies. Christ, people, I want to give you money in exchange for something you are selling. Why do you make it hard?)

In other words, I wish the same thing.
posted by kalimac at 10:16 AM on July 29, 2010

I see it prescribing the Three Jump Maximum rule of thumb and this fills me with NERD RAGE. Sites that make all page hierarchies a thousand pages wide and one deep, or pack all kinds of unrelated content into vague catchall categories, can be blamed directly on this notion.

Other than that, this is pretty okay. These days, a lot of the recommendations can be handled in the breach; Any run-of-the-mill CMS or blog software, for example, will automatically manage the navigation for your site, and the less you fiddle with its defaults, the more likely it is to make good, accessible menus. It's up to the site owner to give things clear titles, tag and categorize appropriately, spell-check, and so on.

Like with most design pattern guides, you can make crap sites following these rules, but you're more likely to make crap sites if you don't follow these rules.
posted by ardgedee at 10:16 AM on July 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

Non functional homepages and "splash" pages seem to have largely disappeared.
posted by Artw at 10:27 AM on July 29, 2010

The author has a talent for spelling out things you might say are obvious...I guess it's comforting to some people to have everything written down.
posted by circular at 10:35 AM on July 29, 2010

Site maps seem to have pretty much disappeared.

Haven't they just metamorphosized into the behind-the-scenes sitemap.xml?
posted by griphus at 10:39 AM on July 29, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I was just thinking that - whenever I do make sitemaps now it's for machines.
posted by Artw at 10:41 AM on July 29, 2010

...which is actually part of another subtle change - searching, including searches performed by Google and other exterior search engines, becoming accepted as a major means of site navigation. Standards compliance and it;s dark twin SEO bullcrap have both expanded because of this.
posted by Artw at 10:43 AM on July 29, 2010

For a guy obsessed with usability, Jakob Nielsen sure has an awful website.

Nielsen's apparent guru status has long been a puzzle to me, and I wonder if it's as much a marketing lesson as Seth Godin's status is.
posted by weston at 11:02 AM on July 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

I hope they all have professional white backgrounds.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 11:03 AM on July 29, 2010

Neilson is a grumpy sod who appears to have an almost pathological aversion to pretty design, but he's not turned out to be wrong about a lot of things.
posted by Artw at 11:47 AM on July 29, 2010

Nielsen has great ideas; he just doesn't bother applying them to his own site for some reason. His influence has been broad, and AFAICT uniformly positive.

As far as site maps, their disappearance is somewhat unfortunate. In usability tests I've done when retaining the "Site Map" link, there are still people (even young people) who go there right away to find stuff.

And yes, the Three Jump Maximum (usually called the 3 Click Rule) has been discredited repeatedly. Users are happy to click, as long as you give them feedback letting them know they're getting closer to what they're looking for -- a good architecture that's 7 layers deep is better than a bad one that's 3.
posted by coolguymichael at 11:48 AM on July 29, 2010

Users are happy to click, as long as you give them feedback letting them know they're getting closer to what they're looking for -- a good architecture that's 7 layers deep is better than a bad one that's 3.

My threshold for saying "fuck it" and googling the site if I don't feel like I'm getting closer to what I'm looking for is probably less than 3.
posted by Artw at 11:53 AM on July 29, 2010

Sure, but it depends on the site. If you're looking for a new pair of sneakers, three clicks is a decent rule of thumb. If you're trying to find legal information about the cultivation of a specific variety of plant in a certain township in a certain state, you'll be a little more patient.

Honestly, the whole Tootsie Pop argument about information architecture got blown up by how easy it is to implement a decent search engine on a site now. Same thing for sitemaps: they've disappeared from view, but people still provide them in XML format for search engines to refine their knowledge of a site.
posted by yerfatma at 12:07 PM on July 29, 2010

Nielsen's apparent guru status has long been a puzzle to me, and I wonder if it's as much a marketing lesson as Seth Godin's status is.

XKCD sums Seth Godin up nicely.

On the other hand, Nielsen's first book was pretty good. Just like Tufte, I'm not sure he's truly the be-all and end-all of usability, but he seems to understand what's going on well enough.

Also, the book had descriptive pictures and a good layout, unlike his website.
posted by schmod at 12:16 PM on July 29, 2010

I don't see the problem with Nielsen's site. It's simple, and without a lot of distractions. Much like another site I know.
posted by pwnguin at 12:24 PM on July 29, 2010

Most of the complaints come from graphic designers and other PhotoShop jockeys who don't see how a site can be "designed" well if not gussied up to the nines. I'd almost say it was making a point there, but it doesn't have to be quite that ugly to do it.
posted by Artw at 12:27 PM on July 29, 2010

Occasionally a visitor will try to find something on your site by guessing its URL. If your URLs are obscure, visitors' attempts to guess them will always fail. [...] Therefore, make your URLs simple enough to guess, and to remember.

A nugget of wisdom from http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/guessable.urls.html
posted by turaho at 1:37 PM on July 29, 2010 [2 favorites]

Site maps seem to have pretty much disappeared.

Not on sewing sites, oddly enough. Willow Fabrics and Fabric Land both have them - the latter is really hard to navigate but endearingly dated. Except for the Christmas page, which has bloody MIDI on it.
posted by mippy at 9:19 AM on July 30, 2010

No DHTML snow?
posted by Artw at 9:35 AM on July 30, 2010