Your recommendations for the best designed web sites?

Encinitas · October 23, 2003, 12:21am

I am taking a web design and usability class. For our final project we have to analyze the best web site we can find. We must focus on how the site functions, what are its goals and whether it achieves them or not.

My mind has gone blank. I can’t think of a site that is really great in terms of design (unlike The Straight Dope which is great in terms of content). So I am throwing it out to you Dopers for your suggestions.

It has to be a large-ish site with at least 3 tiers of navigation (home page, sub-page, content page). I am not so much looking for bells and whistles or flashy animation or exciting content. I want a site that is straight forward and does what it needs to do with the minimum amount of fuss.

Any suggestions?

Ryle_Dup · October 23, 2003, 12:46am

www.google.com

London_Calling · October 23, 2003, 12:57am

A couple of reference tools:

http://www.coolhomepages.com/

Doomtrain · October 23, 2003, 1:11am

I have always liked Salon.com’s layout and design.

Urban_Ranger · October 23, 2003, 3:41am

Good designs are simple, functional, and uncluttered.

This is a great website aboout what not to do: Webpagesthatsuck

cmason32 · October 23, 2003, 5:06am

I always thought www.apple.com was good

Dragwyr · October 23, 2003, 2:13pm

Hi, Encinitas.

I’ve e-mailed you regarding this. Please let me know what you think.

Encinitas · October 23, 2003, 4:39pm

Thanks so much everyone. All good suggestions. I will have to mull it over and see which one I want to tackle. Dragwyr even shyly offered up his website for consideration. It is very good, by the way.
Cheers!

Ender_Will · October 23, 2003, 5:35pm

Check out the Best Page in the Universe. The format is discussed about halfway down this page.

rjung · October 23, 2003, 8:04pm

Mine!
Link below.

Bill_H · October 23, 2003, 8:29pm

It really depends on the objective.

If you have a lot of information to make accessible from a single homepage, you’ll need to do something like www.cisco.com or www.microsoft.com or www.yahoo.com

If you’re a web search, something like www.google.com is all you need, even though there’s enormous amounts of info behind it

If you’re just displaying art, perhaps you want to do something like my link below or maybe not.

Nichol_storm · October 23, 2003, 9:04pm

One of the most beautiful webpages (and most entertaining!) is Joan Bos’ Mad Monarchs.