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:

Seth Godin advised his readers to blow up their websites’ home pages. Is the home page irrelevant? To answer that, I dug up a blog post I remembered reading a couple years ago on UIE’s site. Jared Spool and his associates at UIE actually do the scientific research on questions like this.

The answer is that your site’s home page is indeed important, but not in the way you may think. And it’s not the most important page on your site, even though it probably gets more traffic than any other page on your site.

Joshua Porter at User Interface Engineering notes:

You’ve got to hand it to MySpace. The designers there have done the impossible: they’ve created a site that tramples on the aesthetic sensibilities of nearly everyone while continuing to grow and be successful.

Then he explains why MySpace is good for design. The reason, in a nutshell, is that MySpace actually provides value to its users:

I was doing research for a client. In the span of less than a half hour, I visited three sites. And in that span of time, I encountered some of the biggest site-design mistakes on the web. By “big,” I mean that these mistakes are costing these businesses customers. The right prospects might be visiting their sites right under their noses. And there’s nothing they can do to turn them into customers. They probably don’t even realize that these visitors are even there.