In an article on Sitepoint Industry Forum I read that Business Week had compiled as to what is being referred as the Ten Commandments of Web Design. The people who contributed to the article were well known authors and speakers.

Here they are:

“1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash.

2. Thou shalt not hide content.

3. Thou shalt not clutter.

4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections.

5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 Company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels.

6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of typography.

7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences.

8. Thou shalt be social.

9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies.

10. Thou shalt make content king. “

After reading this article I went into deep thought pondering to what the world has come to. At the beginning of times there were these ten commandments (I am not a well informed historian and my skills at being a historian went down the drain when I was in the 6th grade when my teacher caught me snoring) which control the life of most believing Christians in the world (this is for reference sakes only and no offence is intended) and here come another Ten Commandments to control the life of us….the small but growing breed of Web Developers (web designers) of today. After being jerked out of my pondering by my colleagues who thought I was asleep again at my desk I started to think about the righteousness of the Ten Commandments specified for web design and soon enough I had enough thoughts to contradict the above said. So here I go…I sit up straight, clench my fists hard so that my sleepy fingers wake up and with a deep breath I begin:

1. Thou shalt not abuse Flash: Yes sir….flash can definitely be abused only in the hands of a person who does not know what to do with it or if the person has no creativity. How else can flash be abused? Of what I think is HTML can be abused too (ever seen how HTML code is messed up by designers who just take up the code from 10 different websites and try to make it work?) and so can CSS. AJAX was developed abused and has more issues than creating a site in pure Flash. How else can you abuse Flash, I do not really understand. Maybe by using Flash in places where it is not required like the footer of the website…..hehehehe…amusing idea…well that’s the end of my pervertness in abusing Flash. But if you use Flash in the correct manner you can not only get a beautiful website but also a very impactful website. The closest example is our website www.felixlabs.com.

2. Thou shalt not hide content: Hide content??? I wonder who would want to do that except for a spy selling secrets on his website…or do you mean pop-ups or those small forms popping up on a website covering up all the content.. Well let’s see this from another point of view. How many people have websites just for the sake of it and not for earning money? If you can put in an advertisement that will generate some income to your website, would you say no? Pop-ups are not necessarily bad and sometimes are a convenient way to have a visitor stay back on your website. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not saying that pop-ups shouldn’t be avoided, or that they aren’t annoying, or that there aren’t usability issues with them. What I’m saying is that it’s not always black and white. Usability is a science with fundamental principles, but it’s not the only influencing factor in the design of a for-profit web site. There are other factors, such as the bottom line — and as long as your site exists to turn a profit, this wrestling match between ideal and profitable will continue to exist. In fact from a accessibility point of view they are far less evil than those JavaScript or Flash based floatovers that cover everything and give no clue on how to close them.

3. Thou shalt not clutter: What are we talking about here?? Too much text or too many boxes or advertisements and less of empty/white space. Any more or less knowledgeable or experienced designer will have the common sense to balance the design and the content on the page. I have thought over this for quite some time and cannot argue much over this point as it does have meaning to it. But it has been put as a rule to be followed religiously ( that’s why they called it the Ten Commandments and not the Ten Not To Do’s of web design) and Commandments should not be ambiguous. Right???!!!

4. Thou shalt not overuse glassy reflections: Hmmmm…..why wouldn’t I?? How to give a website the “WOW” effect……ok…there’s nothing much to say here again….overdose of anything and everything is bad…..

5. Thou shalt not name your Web 2.0 company with an unnecessary surplus or dearth of vowels: Now now…..i thought we were talking about design and design related Commandments…and they are (the widely acclaimed writers and speakers) telling us how to chose the domain name…well well….seems out of place…every business has its own clientage, own products etc and if someone decides to name his company buyabuck.com what’s wrong with that if he is selling bucks. Let’s stick to the topic here…principles of design, colors, textures, different kind of abuses etc and leave the name and domain things to the owners of their respective businesses.

6. Thou shalt worship at the altar of Typography: Please…gods of the web world…please save us from thy whims….we live in a world where not all are equipped with the tools to view thy whims on their screens. Most of them don’t even have decent internet connections to wait until the page downloads not talking about the free availability of fonts and other hurdles and of course the patience. But we are optimistic that one day we all will have a at least 10Mb optical fiber connections and expertise to use the tools and view the altar of typography in all its glory. Until then the truth is “Typography on the web SUCKS” and until we have good tools to overcome these hurdles the truth remains unchanged.

7. Thou shalt create immersive experiences: Wonder what it means?? I am talking about the “immersive experience”. Because what the author describes certainly puzzles me. He has given us Youtube.com as an example and defines ‘immersive experiences” as the ones that “can capture and hold users attention”. Please correct if I am wrong: YouTube has a cluttered design, heavily flash reliant (almost nearing the first Commandment of abuse) and contains 4 vowels (if I am correct there are 7 vowels in English language) in its name. Question: Why do people keep coming back to it? Due to its content or due to its design?

8. Thou shalt be social: Ok I will be…..when I start a social networking site. This point was included in the paragraph starting with “Web 2.0 is everywhere” and “MySpace started it all” common guys….you want to tell us that if the website has the functionality where users are able to interact with each other then, your website will do great otherwise….. Your website may depend on various things for its success on the web and this definitely isn’t one of the requirements only if your website is not a social networking website. So give us a break people…..Jeremy Keith does not allow comments on his blog, would you consider him not to be successful?? I do really wonder sometimes how people come up with such ideas and make millions…maybe I should also join their community and start making some dough…..common sense is not a major necessity.

9. Thou shalt embrace proven technologies: Proven technologies…….yes we do embrace proven technologies like xHTML, CSS, Flex and everything else that has been a industry trend but quote:

“Wikipedia, YouTube, Face book, and their cohorts have become a part of daily life. Sites that can incorporate these elements into their design will connect with users in a meaningful way…”

????!!! What? Since when has Face book become a proven technology and that you are required to integrate it into your website and what elements….where is he coming from? Are they implementing that we do only social websites or if follow the latter then to use the same designs as of the said websites (Copyrights and piracy rulezzzz or are they advertizing the above said). My thought…the author woke up in the morning after a wild night and made this up just when he was asked his opinion….seriously I don’t think that the author did any deep thinking on this part and that is neither researched upon nor refined sufficiently to be a Commandment.

10. Thou shalt make content king: Yes we understand the importance of content not only to the clients but also to search engines like Google which rank your website as per the content…..but again what has this got to do with design?? Most of our clients see their designs finalized with dummy text and they leave the content for the last….and what if we were: Sir we cannot start with the design as long as we do not have the content for your website. I can definitely imagine the clients reaction and the face that he will make when he hears that. Why in god’s name we need design in the first place when we could have just displayed the content and save us so much trouble. No flash, no pop-ups, no designs…we would all have been much much richer than we are just by saving thousands of dollars on those software’s that we have spent.

Way to go….

To end this, all I have to say is that not all is that bad as it looks. I would have done more research on this before putting out the Ten Commandments….they certainly have a place but not as set of orthodox rules on stone but as full research material for PhD’s on white board’s. Some of them are even with a promising future but fail due to incomplete research and ill advice. It’s hardly a set of rules that have been refined enough to warrant printing out and posting in your cubicle, let alone etching in stone.

This has been a tiring one….. I thought this would be a quick one but took me over 3 hours of rigorous thought and typing to get through with this. I hope you like what you read….please leave your comments and feedback as they are really important to us. Please feel free to suggest topics that you would like to read. And of course please subscribe to our RSS Feeds to receive updates on the articles.