Looking at the top rated list of sites at Stylegala I was surprised to see that the highest rated site was only a 7.4 followed by a 7.0 and the third highest site can only manage a 6.7. Judging by the comments from the other CSS galleries I have a feeling that the same type of ratings would apply if these sites allowed ratings as well. Is this a case of designers just being too harsh or is there no such thing as a design that deserves even an eight? I think it’s just the fact that many of us have forgotten (or didn’t even know) what makes up a quality design.
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Back in November of 2003 I started a little experiment. I created a web design company site along with a blog with the intentions of seeing how easy it would be to acquire new clients from a really simple design and also to see how people treat and look at a company’s blog compared to that of a freelancer’s. With regards to gaining clients it was just a matter of finding the ones that were attracted to simple design and could see the value in it. I wasn’t doing this to fool anyone so every prospect that came along I simply told them that I was too busy and referred them to other designers.
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I have been doing a lot of thinking lately with regards to design and the rules we bind ourselves within. In the next couple of days (maybe today) I will be reintroducing a site that will begin to showcase my thoughts from the previous weeks and start to apply these thoughts across a couple of my sites — Whitespace included.
Within our designs we have applied both spoken and unspoken rules that every once in a while get broken. When this occurs it seems to start a revolution amongst the townsfolk who contemplate whether the idea is genius or not. In the end though, sites that follow the norm will always dominate because they wouldn’t be in the norm otherwise. I am sure though that none of us simply wish to be part of the norm when we know we can strive above it.
With this in mind here is a list of rules that I think sites follow to keep them in the norm.
- Logo at the top
- Left-aligned or center-aligned design
- Recent entries/comments on all pages
- Comments under entry
- Two or three column layout
- Having a logo on the site
- More than one entry on the homepage
- More ads equals more chance to make money
- Bigger is better
- Smaller is cooler
There are a couple of sites that I am sure you have come across that don’t follow these conventions or rules. Garrett’s site is one column and it seems to be effective in its presentation of content. He is by no means the first to use one column and he certainly won’t be the last, but I brought him up because it was the last one of recent memory that I could think of.
I don’t believe that anyone should attempt to break these standards since they are there for a reason. They just work. However, I wonder if we get so caught up in them that as designers we no longer attempt to stretch the limits that we have set for ourselves.
In any case I look forward to sharing my thoughts on this topic further and in applying the new principles that I am setting for myself because I think it will make this site and all the other sites involved much better.
As for the comments, if you could point me to some sites/blogs that break some of the rules that I have listed above I would greatly appreciate it.
Last week I asked your opinion on how a company should handle a price increase on a web application that they host. I also wrote this as an experiment to see what type of responses I would get if I didn’t mention the company’s name and not surprisingly the responses were very level-headed.
The web application that I was specifically talking about was Basecamp, by the ever-popular 37signals. In January of this year they raised the pricing of their packages and for the most part not too many people in the comments seem to mind. However, I was a bit surprised that there really wasn’t any talk about this within the blogosphere since the higher tier packages saw huge increases.
Depending on the initial price of the service, a 25%-100% increase may or may not be a big deal. I think the key is finding the number that is at the upper end of the “not a big deal” spectrum. Service costs $10 a month now? Ok, raise to $14 a month then. Not a big deal. Service costs $5 a month? Raise to $10 a month. Probably still not a big deal, as long as the customer knows why the increase is occurring.
That’s the key… the customer needs to rationalize the increase in price by correlating it to an increase in utility. If you can announce the addition of 10 new features, even if the customer didn’t necessarily ask for those features, they can say “Oh, ok, well I can see why it’s a little more expensive now.”
– Mike Davidson
Very good point here by Davidson. If your package is priced at $10/mo and you raise it 20% to $12/mo that probably won’t be that big of a deal to most people. However, going from $39/mo to $49/mo or $59/mo to $99/mo seems like a much bigger deal to me. Now to 37signals credit, they did grandfather the pricing for current customers till March 30, but why not keep them at the initial rates to begin with and have the new pricing only effect new customers?
Is that bad business? They did increase the amount of projects you can host on the Pro package so that probably helped some of the Premium members.
By revising all the plans at once, we’re ensuring that we won’t need to revisit pricing again until 2006 — at the earliest.
After reading about the pricing increase does this statement make you feel any more secure about sticking with Basecamp? If not you really have no choice, but to either start all of your project from scratch with another system or stick with the program because Basecamp has no way for you to export your data (to my knowledge at least).
Now this is not a knock against 37signals. We have a Basecamp account setup over at Business Logs so I am not here to complain about the service. I am more interested to see if you think they handled the pricing increase properly or would you have done it differently. I only ask because I have a couple of ideas with regards to web applications that I might pursue in the future and believe that this would serve as a good case study.
And now that 37signals has been mentioned I would like to keep the comments as civil and intelligent as they were in the last post.
Over the past two years we have seen a lot of cool things being done with CSS, but this might be the coolest one to date. It works just like a Windows desktop, but it is done completely in CSS.
What is interesting is to see that most of the positioning was done with unordered and definition lists. The CSS code is clean so this could make an excellent case study for any CSS developers and goes along well with my Learning CSS entry.
The project isn’t complete since Trovster has taken a break from it, but for what he has accomplished so far I must say that I am impressed.
Other tidbits about the project:
- If you do http://desktop.trovster.com/desktop/?name=YOURNAME — it’ll change the start-menu name to your input.
- If you do http://desktop.trovster.com/desktop/?email=email@address.com — it’ll change the user icon if the email address is associated with the Gravatar service.
- If you do http://desktop.trovster.com/desktop/?name=anything@gmail.com — it’ll add a Gmail Notifier icon to the system tray area!
What would you do if you had all of your critical information contained within a web application only to see the prices for the service increase 25%-100%? You applaud the fact that the vendor was able to achieve vendor lock-in because now they are capable of raising prices whenever they choose and the majority of users have no choice but to pay. From a business perspective that may be considered genius.
However, from a relationship perspective how do you view it? What becomes more important to you, the relationship with your customers or the bottomline? Isn’t it safe to assume that their is a direct correlation between the two?
You might consider this a bad strategy, but what if you could get the people who speak highly of your product to speak louder than the ones that disapprove of your practices? Is it okay then? And even better, if when someone speaks negatively about you they get flamed to death and are looked at as being jealous of your success.
Do you achieve lock-in or do you achieve trust? Just a ton of questions I have and really don’t know the answer to.
When you have been working with CSS for so long it becomes difficult to tell people the best methods for learning it because your methods aren’t always what works best for everyone. I definitely encountered my bumps and bruises and still seem to be going through some growing pains in my learning process (although I know a hell of a whole lot). The thing with me and CSS is that no matter how much I seem to know, I always feel like there is a better way to code it, which is probably true.
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Just in case you haven’t been keeping up with the 9rules blog (shame on you) then you probably aren’t aware that we have started to announce the sites that have been accepted into the network. So far we have announced:
Almost like I am starting my own Vault all over again huh?
Anyways we welcome these sites to the network and are excited to have them along for the ride. Keep watching the 9rules blog for more site launches.
If you applied for the network please be patient, as everyone will receive an email.
Since I can’t move the old stuff into the new database I am going to republish some of my old articles, which unfortunately means a loss of comments for these entries. However, I do get to offer a fresh perspective on the articles so they will be even better than before.
Please understand that I love and respect the time everyone takes to make a comment on this site and I do not make this decision lightly. Although all the old content is still viewable, it does not fit in with the current template. Not every page will be brought in, just my favorites so not too much stuff will be regurgitated.
Hope you don’t mind.
Forms have to be one of the most annoying things that a user has to interact with on a website. When I am creating forms on my websites I try to make them so that the user can get through them as quick as possible. I also like to know that users are putting in the information quickly and accurately, which can save me a lot of hassle in the long run. Here are some tips that I have come up with to hopefully make your user’s experience a bit easier.
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