Analysis of a website design survey report

Author: builder.com
Francois Briatte's recent report on Web design has led to a lot of gossip. The report surveyed 10 famous designers ' websites and compared how designers handled 25 common design elements. He also made a detailed analysis of the same or different rates of treatment for the 25 issues on those sites.

I recommend this interesting research report to each designer. If you don't have the time, I will summarize what I think is most important and add some of my own conclusions and explanations (some may be different from Briatte's) for you to share.

similarities in website design

According to the survey report, 10 network designers have a significant similarity in dealing with a number of layout factors. This is a list of common elements that have a probability of 80% or higher on the web site that the designers are designing. Links or return links are underlined

Links that have been visited and regular links are generally distinguished by changing the font color

There is a clickable logo icon at the top of the page linked to the Home page or index page

The footnotes at the bottom of each page are consistent

Body background is white

Body font is Sans-serif font

Use the appropriate notation (in the entity/Escape code, the typographic notation and apostrophes are used to replace ordinary symbols in general text)

No more than six navigation methods

Each page contains a detailed copyright notice

Label the designer's full name on each page

Here are the elements that have a probability of less than 80% on the site: XML front

The supplementary report appears on the left (but appears on the right side is the most common)

The buttons are similar to the famous steal buttons

You can use shortcut keys to create keyboard shortcuts

It's not surprising that all of these designers have a very similar approach to designing some common elements of the list. Using underlined links, you can set up a clickable logo at the top of each page, with a consistent footnote at the bottom, which is the customary practice of moralize in the design of the Web site. These layout elements are deeply ingrained in the impressions of site visitors, and the designers are deeply aware of how important it is to meet the expectations of visitors to create a useful website.

Briatte that the background of using white as the main body was inherited from the print design. In a sense, this may be true. But I don't think so, and I think the designers are doing it to cater to the expectations of the visitors, because the white background makes the visitors feel familiar and comfortable when they read it.

Unlike the printing standard, most designers use Sans-serif as the body font. As Briatte points out, designers clearly understand that serif fonts are easier to identify in print, while Sans-serif fonts are easier to read on the screen.

Interestingly, web designers pay special attention to typesetting details, such as using wavy lines, apostrophes, or dashes instead of ordinary quotes, where dashes are made up of hyphens.

As a rule of thumb, these sites limit navigation to six. This is not surprising, because the use of six navigation bar to make the site work well, so it evolved into the current rule.

Similarly, it makes sense for designers to label a detailed copyright notice on each page. In today's society, there is a complete legal necessity. Briatte more attention to this phenomenon, that is, designers on each page to note their own full name, rather than using a nickname. For me, it would be surprising if a designer did not sign his work. After all, most of them make a living by web design, and after that, each page is their job advertisement.

Of these designers, no one has used XML precursors on their websites. This is in contrast to the official recommendation, but it also acknowledges the fact that the XML front will cause some problems in the main browser. These sites rarely put the horizontal file on the left, while the right side is very common (accounting for 70%), and I'm not quite sure why. Briatte that putting it on the left interferes with reading. But I think in the source code to put the text on the support (horizontal file) on top of this is a structural improvement, combined with the horizontal file on the left side of the practice, believe that this is a style trend.

button graphics on many sites are generally based on steal, but none of the sites surveyed are used. These professional designers certainly do not borrow other people's design, they will naturally create their own unique style of the button.

In the designer's highly consistent design style, it is really surprising that only two of them have designed keyboard shortcuts to navigate the web. Obviously, either because of accessibility or because of usability reasons, these designers think that you don't have to bother to set keyboard shortcuts. This may also change in the future.

differences in the design of the website

It's not surprising that most designers are dealing with some elements of web design in the same way. However, the survey does not point out some interesting differences in other areas.

When I found that the fixed layout was much more than the flow layout, I was stunned. Fixed layouts have their part, but I expect these versatile designers to show their skill in the mobile layout. Designers may be tired of the tight operations on the mobile layout of their customers ' websites. They prefer to design a relatively simple, fixed-width layout for personal sites.

The other thing that surprises me is that only 70% of the designers used XHTML, and I thought 100% of the designers would adopt it. And one of the things that surprises me is that 60% of websites use image-based scroll bars instead of pure CSS scrolling on their navigation bars.

They also have an interesting disagreement that 60% of designers use strict file types, which means they must follow the more stringent coding standards of that specification. By comparison, nearly half of the people prefer looser file types, such as transition type.

These web sites have the same search box independent display style sheet, which is also a difference between them. If these highly recommended methods make web search more characteristic, I wonder why they are so common. Half of the sites do not display stylesheets, which is also easier to explain because they are designed to print successfully even without a separate stylesheet for print.

differences between the same

I think the most interesting thing is not to look at the data in the survey report, but to visit the actual sites. A number of websites reflect current trends and layout styles. In fact, some websites are responsible for forming this trend. Although these sites have significant similarities, they are very different. After all, it's not like cutting bread--it's a collection of replicas. Designers have enough space within the framework of agreed customs and proven technologies to develop their creativity and demonstrate their ability to express themselves.