Popular web sites dominate Internet use. 80% of web traffic goes to about 1/2 of 1% of the sites! Obviously, these sites are doing something that is making them work for users.
This article looks at what you can learn from 10 of the most popular sites on the web. Are there any common elements in these sites that companies can apply to creating and developing their own sites?
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10 Top Sites |
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Amazon |
To find out, I looked at 10 popular sites, reviewed their content, their look and their construction. These sites, right, are top ranked by several different internet ranking services. It could be argued that some of the sites are popular for reasons other than their content or design. Nevertheless, if one's goal is attracting and retaining a large audience, these sites have done it.
There are several lessons to be learned from these popular sites:
- Make content easy to find.
- Design for users, not designers.
- Faster is better.
- Change is bad.
- Don't try anything new.
Make content easy to find.
All of these sites have very little copy on their home pages, but
are instead are dominated by well-organized links to content throughout
the site and the internet. Most likely, your site will not be as
link-heavy as these, but you still must make your content easy to find.
The key to this is a good structure for your site; this structure must
provide a clear framework for organizing the information.
A good web site structure results from determining the minimum number of categories necessary to organize the information in the site. There should be 5-10 top-level categories. Next, within each of these top-level categories, one should find the minimum number of sub-categories needed to organize the information. By doing this, one creates a tree that branches out quickly, and this minimizes the number of links one needs to click to get to any piece of information.
Design for users, not designers.
All of these sites feature a design that presents the
information as clearly as possibly. This is because the pages are not
