atitlan web design duncan aitken panajachel, guatemala ++502 5583 8328

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I have formed my approach to web design through personal experience and online research. Below are some sites I find particularly interesting.

First Impressions Count in Website Design
"Through the halo effect, first impressions can influence subsequent judgments of website credibility and buying decisions. Web designers have as little as 50 milliseconds to capture the interest of potential customers."
websiteoptimization.com

Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility
"Ten guidelines for building the credibility of a website. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people." Written by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
webcredibility.org

Web Style Guide
"If your site is successful it will have to be genuinely useful to your target audience, meeting their needs and expectations without being too hard to use." Web Style Guide is a book well worth buying, but the website is both a great online resource and an example of what good web design can do. I found the site while looking for something else and an hour later I was so absorbed in the site I had completely forgotten what I was looking for in the first place.
webstyleguide.com

How Do People Evaluate a website's Credibility?
"Imagine a world in which people could not reliably assess the credibility of what they find online. What would be the ultimate outcome? In our view, people would eventually stop using the Web for anything that really matters." The full report from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
consumerwebwatch.org

Blink
Blink is a book "about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye", written by Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer with the New Yorker Magazine. Also his website is a good example of what I consider to be good web design.
gladwell.com

Flash: 99% Bad
"About 99% of the time, the presence of Flash on a website constitutes a usability disease. Although there are rare occurrences of good Flash design (it even adds value on occasion), the use of Flash typically lowers usability."
useit.com

Keep it simple, stupid!
"The Dalai Lama once said that simplicity is the key to happiness in the modern world. This philosophy can be adapted into the realm of web design and digital interface design. Simplicity lasts. Simplicity is necessary in order to properly convey any idea."
digital-web.com

Google
The website that became a verb. I include Google not as a search engine, but as the ultimate example of what good, simple design can do. The site loads in an instant. It looks clean, professional and uncluttered. Google has left Yahoo, MSN, Lycos and all other search engines in the dust in part by wholeheartedly embracing the concepts promoted by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.
google.com

Web Pages that Suck
"Learn from the mistakes of FedEx, Brown University, The Pope, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Adobe, Apple, Harvard Business Review, Tom Peters, Saturn Auto, Memorex, Minolta, Saab, Intel, Chevrolet, Swatch, Canon, and thousands of other sites featured here for using bad web design techniques."
webpagesthatsuck.com