Notes
How websites are built, why they go wrong, and what to do instead.
Notes I took over the years as a web designer.
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What people came to do
Most visitors come for one of five things. How to find out which five
Ask an organisation what belongs on its website and you get everything: the history, the values, the press releases, the new logo, the department that felt overlooked last time. Ask a visitor and you get one thing. What…
Designing for real tasks
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The three digits nobody reads
The status codes every page carries, where the numbers came from, and the ten worth knowing
When a browser asks a server for a page, the first thing that comes back is not the page. It is a line with a number on it. The browser reads that number, decides what to do — show this, go somewhere else, use the…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The quiet is the design
Why a calm page is harder to make than a loud one
Count what a careful web page gives up. No decorative typeface, because it has to be read by someone with low vision on a bad screen. No colour that carries meaning on its own, because a twentieth of the men looking at…
Designing for the web
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The code you did not write
What a plugin really is, and why this site has none
That last sentence usually gets one of two responses. Either “how is that possible”, or “why would you make life hard for yourself”. Both are fair, and the answer to both is the same: for a small site with a stable…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The address people write to
Why one email address, why hello@, and why not a contact form
Every address says something before a single message arrives. It tells the reader what kind of thing is on the other end: a person, a department, a machine, or nothing at all. Four of them turn up on almost every…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The interruption you cannot turn off
Pop-ups were beaten once. They came back as part of the page
You follow a link because you want to read one paragraph. The page arrives, and before you reach it: a box about cookies. Behind it, a box offering ten per cent off. In the corner, a request to send you notifications…
Designing for the web
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The page nobody designs
What to put on a 404 page, whether a joke belongs there, and when to redirect instead
Nobody plans to arrive there. Somebody mistypes an address, follows a link from four years ago, opens a bookmark from a laptop they have since replaced, or clicks something in a newsletter where a comma got stuck to the…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The page only one program can read
What a page builder does with your content, and what it costs to get it back
Both times the brief was the same, and both times it was phrased carefully, the way people phrase things when they suspect the answer is expensive. The site worked, more or less. It was slow. Small changes broke other…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The promise in every link
How to write a link, and why a web address should outlive the page
Nielsen Norman Group put it in four words: a link is a promise. The text says what the reader will find; the page has to deliver exactly that, immediately, without a second click. Every time it doesn't — the label said…
Webdesign: small decisions
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The keys, and who holds them
Passwords, two-factor, and the question nobody asks: whose name is the account in
The advice everybody absorbed in the 2000s — make it complicated, change it every three months, never write it down — produced exactly what you would expect. People invented one password with a capital letter and an…
Webdesign: small decisions
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PDF: the format that will not bend
When a PDF is the right answer, and the four times it is not
You are on a web page from a municipality, a ministry, an agency. Somewhere in the middle of a sentence there is a link, and behind the link is a file: twelve pages, four megabytes, a cover with a logo, a table of…
Writing and publishing for the web
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Nothing to accept
Why this website has no cookie banner, and what it would cost to need one
European rules do not say "every website must ask permission". They say that before you store something on a visitor's device that is not strictly needed to deliver the page, you have to ask, and the asking has to be…
Webdesign: small decisions
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Nobody names the honest ones
Dark patterns all have names. Their opposite has none
Harry Brignull named them dark patterns in 2010 and has been keeping the catalogue ever since; he now calls them deceptive patterns, which is the more honest word. The catalogue has grown into a taxonomy with names for…
Designing for the web
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Emphasis is a budget
Bold, italic, quotation marks and the underline — what each one is for
Someone scanning a page sees what is different before reading what is there. That is the entire mechanism: a marked word works because it is rare. Put bold in every second sentence and the eye stops reading it as a…
Writing and publishing for the web
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Inside-out design
Services built from the organisation’s logic instead of the visitor’s
Some time ago I had to register a small rental property with the regional authorities. A legitimate obligation, a modest formality, and on paper a matter of an afternoon. It took considerably longer, and along the way…
Designing for real tasks
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A search engine made of paper
Paul Otlet built one in 1895, out of index cards
In 1895 Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine started writing down, on standard cards, every book and article they could find. Not a library — a library holds the things it owns. This was meant to be an index of everything…
Where the web comes from
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Kicking out the paragraph
Why text on a screen works better in blocks than in prose
In 1965 a psychologist at Columbia University named Robert Horn began looking at how people cope with large amounts of complicated information. He noticed something that sounds obvious and turns out not to be: the…
Writing and publishing for the web