The best in web design?

Thanks for the great links. To take the opportunity argue against deathshadow60, a man I could not disagree with more, they are some of the few websites on the web that are beautiful to read and use. Their colour contrast is not harsh, muted and pleasant to look at. Contrast is not everything and there is such thing as too much, for example http://www.deathshadow.com is much like starring into a neon light. I might add that serifs are not the devils work, and are easily read on screen.

The advantage of a fixe-widthd layout is you can keep your layout the same desired proportions no matter the screen size, having it flexible can throw the balance out. Though I would agree it important to account for variable screen sizes. A flexible layout is one solution but if you want something more carefully curated another solution would be multiple fixed-width layouts that displayed depending on the user resolution.

And whilst these sites do not function without images and css, we have reached point where these technologies are completely accessible to everyone and I see no reason not to rely on them. It I would agree that websites content is the most important thing on a website but it would be foolish to try and separate it from the layout. The content is very important and layout is the matter by which it is delivered, and these website above have careful curated their content so you see what you need to see first, you are visually directed to the content, and relying on backwards compatibility can severely effect usability.

If website can enhance the readability and show technological prowess, it should, and it should not sacrifice this for the very few late adopters that are around.

To add to this, one of my favourite websites is imagemechanics.com.au.
Fantastic use of javascript animation.

Also http://www.nikebetterworld.com/about

In my opinion user friendly layout is really important factor for a god website. Graphics and backgrounds should be browser safe as well. Animated graphics are added advantage.

@deathshadow60; I’m curious if you found any sites that are both beautiful to look at and good example of design as well as usable and accessible.

I mainly agree with you in that we should be thinking about content first and then the look, figuring out how to get a good appearance while keeping up with the highest standards possible in terms of accessibility.

Usability should also taken into serious consideration, of course.

Yet, I’m truly curious if there’s any site that you find beautiful and accessible. It may not be a 100% perfect site but a sites that you would give a, let’s say 6 out of 10

Opposing viewpoints is how we make things BETTER!

Such as?

Not at smaller sizes, not at low resolutions. Serif fonts are good for PRINT or at really large sizes. You get down to 14px or smaller, they’re pretty much useless… and even 16px isn’t that great for large font/120dpi users. The lack of PPI (Pixels per inch) on displays means that serifs can result in an illegible font.

Which is part of why I go 85% for sans-serif and 100% (or more) for serif on BODY.

You call this an advantage? Too big for netbooks, too small for desktops?

Oh yes, design the page multiple times, that’s so efficient – though making use of extra screen space – like taking a two column layout and turning it three column – isn’t a bad choice, I’d still go with semi-fluid inside that…

Then you fail to grasp the POINT of HTML.

… and when that layout does not fit on a netbook, is too small for a desktop, doesn’t work if you send it to print? You know, the entire REASON we have the MEDIA attribute on LINK? The entire POINT of HTML in the first place?

Say WHAT?!? How would graceful degradation thanks to progressive enhancement “severely effect usability” apart from making it BETTER?

If by that you mean useless scripting for nothing bloating out the page into uselessness. I mean, on top of the piss poor illegible contrasts and absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts – it’s effectively useless to even try and navigate… try it on a netbook… try reading it on a 1920x1200 display where you have to zoom in 50% just to make the text big enough to read, making the crappy fixed width too big for the screen… Hell, it doesn’t even work right on my normal laptop (which at 1680x1050 there’s no excuse). It’s a laundry list of how to piss on accessibility.

At first I thought the site was broken, because it took >40 seconds for that massively idiotic image to load and be decoded. The main page is effectively a splash page – something that belongs on the normal “top ten” lists of “don’t do”. The dark green on light green illegible about in absurdly undersized fonts on the two item menu… You sludge through to the project page (which takes enough time to go make coffee) you get illegible red text on tan with a goofy font for the white text that’s also illegible… The side “buttons” are completely counterintuitive and look more like part of the image than navigation… and at 1.1 to 1.5 MEGABYTES in 30-40 files depending on the page, it’s so massively bloated I can’t see anyone waiting for it to load. (unless you’re in the magical chicagoland hub-zone – try it on the far side of the Appalachians where I get faster connects across the pond to Europe than I do to the rest of the US on a “22mbps” connection…)

Seriously, apart from costing Nike a fortune to host for nothing but bounce, what’s even the POINT of that site?!? PRECISELY what I mean when talking about dumping a can of shellac on a turd… To me that SCREAMS someone let one of the print folks design the site – and the web is NOT print. You can tell it’s a rubbish site since most of it’s pages you’re lucky if there’s ten words on the screen at 1920x1200, and the rest of it are pointless stock photos.

I’m starting to be convinced that the two are diametrically opposed… because I’ve never seen a ‘pretty’ site that was worth a damn in terms of usability or content of value. As much as I think Jakon Nielsen is out in noodle-doodle land, the more the PSD jockeys vomit up these disasters the more I’m moving to his viewpoint.

… because to be frank, I’m increasingly finding the Internet less and less useful than it was a decade ago. I’ve stopped visiting so many websites after the javascript framework people piss on them, stopped visiting even more websites because of the PSD jockeys useless layouts and absurdly bloated load times, and stopped visiting even more sites from all the IDIOTS declaring content fonts in PX. In a lot of ways the Internet was MORE useful before CSS, Javascript and pre HTML 3.2 because HTML didn’t let you screw up this badly…

See webmail – all of which are now useless AJAX bloat that’s broken half the time I try to use them; they’ve become such total rubbish I’ve gone back to SHOCK using mail client software, when for the past decade I pretty much gave up on said programs FOR webmail because it was better. Not anymore.

Hell, I wouldn’t even be using these forums if I didn’t disable javascript and use a custom user.css to override the uselessly broken layouts, annoying effects and pointless bloat. The folks behind things like vBulletin, Wordpress, etc, being so obviously INEPT at writing HTML it’s a miracle the Internet works at all.

All I can say is I disagree, there’s plenty of examples above which prove otherwise. Of course you’d disagree to that.

It’s not about efficiency, it’s about what is best for the user.

May i ask what exactly is the point of html? As far as I’m concerned html is tool and we are using it for new and better things everyday, it’s point is in constant evolution. If we stuck to the original point of a computer I would not be in our homes or pockets.

I have no trouble reading this on my iphone 960*640 and that screen is tiny. Maybe I have super-eyes?

Sigh… How the content is displayed is just as important as the content itself.

I up for graceful degradation to a certain level. Should a page function without the latest html5 & css3? Yes, but I’m not going to design a page that is capable of displaying only in html. It’s waste of time and no matter how hard I try it will look like a monkey’s ****. Those users who are still using IE4 and can’t read css or javascript deserve to live in their technological wasteland. If they don’t like it they should update, the technology is readily available.