your thoughts on the "perfect" website

just a random question...what do you consider to be the "perfect" website?

in other words, list any and all features included, colors, layout/navigation, etc...

1.Fast loading
2.Cool to the eyes
3.User friendly
4.Content centric

A perfect website? Try this:


I mean... there's so much more to web-design than fast loading, eyecandy and SEO, people!

A perfect website is the website built by the user, not the designer. Since we don't have the technology to probe the visitor's mind and display his deepest desires on screen, we'll just have to try and produce a site where the user can set his imagination free and feel like "the content" (what most designers think of as a product that they must sell) is as familiar as his mother's breast and he'll end up knowing it like the back of his hand.
That, my friends, is what makes a perfect website: synchronization with the user's eyes, ears, mind, soul.

Everybody has a different "perfect" Web site, because everybody has different needs. The perfect Web sites for a cell phone user, an IE user, and a blind user may be completely different.

Interestingly, they usually turn out to be the same. When people visit a Web site, they are interested in content. If you bog down the content with design, you will only make the information less easy to access. For instance, if you look at http://candystand.com, it has all these hoops the user has to jump through just to play a game! It would be much better made if the main page simply contained a list of games, with optionally a shrunken screenshot of the game, with a login box. It would be rediculously easy to find the game you want to play via the main site. Which would be a great thing.

In the perfect Web site, the design helps clarify the information and actually decreases the amount of time it takes for the user to get what he/she wants. For the archetypal example of such a Web site design, see Google itself.

Unfortunately, most designers are concerned with throwing art in the way of the user's quest for information.

I believe the perfect Web site has the following properties (not a complete list, of course):

1. It keeps font size and family at the user's preference. This way, it is guaranteed that the user can read comfortably (or tolerably).

2. The site's purpose is made clear instantly.

3. The visitor knows what his current "location" is. That is, the site's contents has a clearly-defined structure (tree-like? linear? categorized?), and each page clearly indicates the user's current location within those contents.

4. Nothing breaks the user's standard model of a Web site interface -- all links are underlined, all links are colored the same (unless you have, say, a different color for external links than internal links and you make this clear to the user with a legend). Linked images must be outlined in the site's link color. No page has links which point to the page itself. Nothing breaks when javascript is turned off, unless it is a specialized Javascript application that is a content of a page itself, such as an online Reverse Polish Notation calculator.

5. All information is marked up in a semantically-correct manner, and heading structure follows an H1-H2-H3-... ordering, without skipping levels.

6. CSS, not tables, should be used for layout, if there is any. Typically, no special layout DIVs should be needed. Navigation is for index.html pages, typically -- other pages should have links at the top and bottom that refer back to the index page. (See http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/ for an example of a site which follows this model.) Universally-copied navigation menus are a no-no; they are almost always irrelevant (unless the site has a categorized structure, and one of the menu items indicates the current location. On very small sites (3-10 documents) with this structure, universal menus are ok.)

7. Long documents must have a table of contents at their top.

I think you all have great valid points that contribute to a great web site.

It may work perfectly more than one browser.

One that has NOTHING to distract my attention while im there, including script/layout errors, popups, banner ads, how to bake a cake when the site name is petsRus ect..

ooo joebert your a hard man to please!

Ah, so it works in IE 6 and IE 5.5!

good colors, not too bright, easy to read, optimized and fast, working good in all browsers, dynamic(PHP or ASP), hmm.. new section is good but it always depends on what kind of site it is but news are almost always good to have

Fast and easy

what more needs to be said? content-centric with no barriers to information.

They did say perfect, I figure no distractions is a good start

I was afraid it would come to this:
What zoic probably meant to ask is "what is the most standard, the dullest site you can think of?", which you all have strived to answer...
THINK for a minute, people: what is fast, content centric, semantically-correct, etc. etc. ? A block of text! Oh, sure, you can add hyperlinks to browse through this insipid e-book.

I'm not saying the site should be full of fluffy images and such, nor that it must be an outstanding display of animation skills. I'm just saying that if you're gonna abide these standards that are getting more and more strict, and you're gonna take a draft like amazon.com or yahoo.com and just change the content, the Internet is NOT going to get any better and people like me might as well move to another planet where DESIGN is actually a form of ART.

Oh, if you're wondering, the closest thing to a "perfect website" I've seen so far is http://conclave.ru/ .But hey, I know you're not gonna like it 'cause it's not SEO friendly and it's a full 400 KB or so... oooh, my !

What I was really trying to get at was what features does a good/perfect website include, but these are helpful too.

Bah, I don't believe in "perfect". No Earthly person, object, or thing is perfect.

Perfection is perception. Something one person reveres as perfect may be the complete opposite in others eyes.

However, most sites are fine by me, so long as...

- They aren't hosted by Geocities, Angelfire, Lycos, etc.
- It isn't made up of a pink background and green text.
- If the background is an image, it does not make the text virtually impossible to read.
- They contain as few animated GIF's as possible... and if it contains any, they relate to the page.
- The design is clear and concise... in other words, you're not searching for the navigation.
- The colors burn your retinas (in other words, they are soft on the eyes).