Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines

In his November 10 Alertbox Jakob Nielsen lists what he considers the ten most violated homepage design guidelines. (That’s homepage, not website, though many of these guidelines apply to every page in a web site.)

Here’s the list:

1. Emphasize what your site offers that’s of value to users and how your services differ from those of key competitors
2. Use a liquid layout that lets users adjust the homepage size
3. Use color to distinguish visited and unvisited links
4. Use graphics to show real content, not just to decorate your homepage
5. Include a tag line that explicitly summarizes what the site or company does
6. Make it easy to access anything recently featured on your homepage
7. Include a short site description in the window title
8. Don’t use a heading to label the search area; instead use a “Search” button to the right of the box
9. With stock quotes, give the percentage of change, not just the points gained or lost
10. Don’t include an active link to the homepage on the homepage

• November 11, 2003
• Comments closed
• Posted in Usability

• Previous post: Multiple versions of IE/Win
• Next post: Flexible vs fixed

Information, sponsorship, and externals

Best of 456 Berea Street

Web development mistakes and Web development mistakes, redux

Mistakes that are commonly encountered on the web, along with explanations of why I consider them mistakes.

Reveal your old school web development hacks

A collection of old school web design and development hacks.

New clearing method needed for IE7?

You may need to adjust your auto-clearing methods to work with IE 7.

CSS Validator colour warnings are not errors

Messages about missing colours or background-colours are not errors and can often safely be ignored.

Opening new windows with JavaScript, version 1.2

A new window script that uses object literal notation for better portability and lets you choose which attribute-value pairs will open links in new windows.

More popular articles

Random places to go

• Le «blog personnel» de Joe Clark
• The Autistic Cuckoo
• Juicy Studio
• Web Axe
• ThePickards
• Bruce Lawson's personal site
• Design View / Andy Rutledge
• AlastairC
• Adactio: Journal
• Jens Meiert