godfather website design

Any competent website designer will have heard of Jeffrey Zeldman, and I suspect that even here in Bangkok his name is not unknown. His acclaimed blog is the most authoritative of its kind on the net; his website design studio, Happy Cog, is often described as the best in the world; and his book, Designing with Web Standards, is regarded as something of a bible by those who take these things seriously.

Recently, Jeffrey made available an earlier book he wrote called Taking Your Talent to the Web. It can be downloaded freely in PDF format. Though some of the book is now dated (it was published in 2001), the section devoted to site navigation is still relevant. In particular, there is a page that talks about the so-called Rule of Five, which states that a website's main menu ought only ever to consist of five links. Any more than this, according to the theory, and site visitors will get confused.

I find this interesting because for a while now I have had to fight the urge to cram in lots of links. More is better, was my thinking. Surely a busy menu bar conveys a greater sense of importance. In the end, though, aesthetics usually triumphed over ill-judged reasoning, and most of the websites I've made recently espouse a “less is more” philosophy.

The book also discusses the importance of consistency. The idea is that while websites are free to use whatever visual cues they want to indicate links or functionality, the cues must remain the same from page to page. Admittedly this may seem obvious, but all too often I've come across sites whose menus changed colour, shape or even position for no logical reason at all.

To read more about the “Godfather of Website design” take a look at this article published by netmag.co.uk in May 2009.