15 Website Good Practice Principles

15 Website Good Practice Principles

Where would we be without serendipity? I was looking for some examples of agile development techniques and stumbled across this excellent post from Tom Loosemore (the man behind Gov.uk from Government Digital Services). I thought I’d repeat the post here, but the original is on Tom Loosemore’s blog, published 7th February, 2007. As relevant today as it was then; proof maybe that sound advice built on practical experience doesn’t diminish over time.

  1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (sourced from Google)
  2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (Sourced from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
  3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
  4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
  5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.
  6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
  7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
  8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
  9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
  10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
  11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all:Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
  12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
  13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes:Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site
  14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
  15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent:After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.

 

 

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