PagePlane.com

November 28, 2011

Web Design

One of the simplest websites in the world is one of the best designed on the web

Political ideologies aside, I've got to agree with Jason Fried of 37signals.com that The Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web. Among the reasons he gives is that the page is straightforward, unique, specific, "good cluttered," and concise.

Perhaps his best argument is that if you were to pull the logo off most of the home pages of the competing news organizations (CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, ABC News, CBS News, and so on) you probably couldn't tell one from the next.

In a recent The New York Times article, David Carr points to the numbers: "With no video, no search optimization, no slide shows, and a design that is right out of mid-'90s manual on HTML, The Drudge Report provides 7 percent of the inbound referrals to the top news sites in the country."

Ty Fujimura for Huffington Post explains, "Beauty is merely one component of design, like usability, speed, cost, and time. Design is not decoration, it's a concerted effort to solve a particular problem. Some sites don't need to be fast. Some don't need to be cheap. Others, like Drudge, don't need to be pretty."

It's certainly a design worth studying.