Ashley McKee at User Interface Engineering posted links to Tutorial Blog’s list of the 60 best standards compliant web site designs. And she asked, whether these web-site designs are usable, as well as visually appealing.

Well, Ashley. Firstly, let me weigh in on a comment by reader DJ, a comment that can hit home for a small-business owner. He says:

For me, it is pretty instructive that none of these sites IMHO are what I would call well trafficked. Therefore the list isn’t that representative of the kind of sites that really play a large role in people’s lives.

This is a comment that can hit home for a small-business owner, because small-business websites usually have very low traffic, at least at first.

The rules of design change depending on who your audience is. Or rather, the tactics you use on your site change. But it doesn’t matter whether your site gets 10 visitors a day or 10,000. In fact, even a low-traffic site can play a huge role in someone’s life, if it’s the right site and the right someone. It’s better for your site to be a low-traffic site that uniquely caters to your ideal customer, than for it to be a high-traffic site that completely misses the point. (And yes, some sites have lots of traffic and do miss the point.)

So, Ashley, looking just at the four sites you snapped, let me start with the Expression Engine site. I immediately understood what the site was about, and I was able to click on “Add-on Architecture” to find out more about that, since that was a feature I was interested in learning more about. But I quickly ran into trouble. I saw that they had a module to add an image gallery, and since this is an area that’s frequently a problem in these types of systems, I wanted to learn more about their image gallery add-on. But I couldn’t click on “Image Gallery.” No problem, I thought. I clicked on “View Included Add-ons.” But I couldn’t find the image-gallery add-on. What I did see was a menu that allowed me to click on “Plugins,” “Modules,” or “Extensions.” What the heck is the difference? I gave up.

The “Guitar Center King of the Blues” site, at first, I didn’t know what to do on it. It’s so busy, it was several minutes before I figured out it was a contest for guitar players. (Note that the site, as it exists now, is not the same as the snapshot image displayed here.) I had to click on the “Rules,” just clicking across the top, at the right, before I figured out that I needed to enter the contest in-person at a Guitar Center store. But I later saw that I could upload my music to enter… something. Clicking on the top banner does nothing: It should link to the site home page. There doesn’t appear to be any way to browse photos on the site, even though they’re featured on the front page. And it was then that I figured out I could register at the site. Now, I happen to be a musician, so I’m potentially within the target market. If I happened to run across this site, I wouldn’t know what to do. Not enough scent throughout the site.

Next, the Vorstat store. The first thing I noticed is that they only have 13 products. So why the complex navigation options? Yes, the “collection tags” are really cool. And it’s great that you can click on different tags to restrict and expand the set of products displayed. But for only 13 products? I’d rather have a big scrolling list with the image next to a brief description of the product. The biggest problem with this site is that you have to roll over each image in order to see a partial abbreviated description pop-up. Silly. Just show me a list with full (but brief) descriptions.

Lastly, the Knoxville site. It’s very cluttered. I pretended I wanted to plan a trip to Knoxville. Once I got past the garishness of the site— How did this site win a graphic-design award? I decided I wanted to discover things to do, places to stay, and places to visit. Nowhere in any of the navigation do they use any of those trigger words. But I found places to stay under “accommodations,” though their search function was too limited, the on-site descriptions didn’t tell me what I needed to know, and I ended up pogoing through them. Similarly with the other items on my list… And I forgot about places to eat, though “dining” was on the navigation menu. So, the information was there, mostly, sort of. But I could have found it much more easily if the site had followed the same process I needed to use to find the information I needed. It probably should have started with a top-level menu for different use-cases. One of these menu options would be, “Plan a trip to Knoxville.”

One thing I find repeatedly is that the content on a site is much more important than the graphic design. Because the content is what helps or hinders the visitor from accomplishing what he wants. Unfortunately, many companies—especially small businesses—spend masses of money on a kewl graphic design, when a simple one would be much more effective. And then they throw up whatever content the company founder can write down in a half-hour. Ugh.

Good web design encompasses both graphic design and content design. And a good web strategy starts with good web design. And then it drives traffic to the site, and measures how well the site accomplishes its goals. And then it uses this information to improve the design of the site. Lather, rinse, repeat.

-TimK

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