Can we see your website?

http://geocities.com/midimagic@sbcglobal.net/index.htm

I normally follow those rules. There are a few exceptions:

1. No angry fruit salad.

I never do this. And I especially avoid the "swoop" image in the upper left corner that so many sites use.

2. No text on top of graphics.

Never.

3. Don't change link colors.

Never.

4. No moving images for any purpose other than to show how something works.

Moving images have been used solely for the purpose of showing a sequence of events in tutorial pages. There are no sounds.

5. No mouseovers.

Never. I hate them.

6. No dropdown menus.

Never. I want all of the links to be visible all of the time. So I use menu pages instead. I do use a rainbow of background colors for the links on some menu pages.

7. Don't use tables in non-tabular situations if you can avoid it.

I use tables for my link tables.

Occasionally I use a table for layout purposes, but only where div+css needs a kludge to work, or won't do the job right.

8. No rotating galleries or moving banners.

Never.

9. Don't make anything blink.

Never.

10. Leave space between items.

Always. But I discovered that the latest version of IE doesn't always render things as I intended, and I haven't yet had time to fix all of them. Lists within lists are banging into the next outer list item below them in IE, but not other browsers. I am still troubleshooting this to find a kludge-free method that works.

Note that I have no control over what Yahoo puts in the ad pane. But there is a button to close the pane.

All of my code validates with W3C. The Yahoo ad won't validate under any doctype.

Jakob Nielsen's website isn't exactly pretty... *sigh*

Midi,

Although you have designed by those rules it really isn't much of a design at all! It is really quite unattractive. I would really like to see a list of popular websites that follow your rules.... I can't find any at all.

Hello I am new to Daniweb and I want to create a website. Please tell me how to do that. Does Daniweb have website tools that I can use? How do I access them? Thank you

You need to find some html tutorials on the internet. Create a thread on daniweb with a specific question if you are stuck with something. It may be useful for you to use a program like adobe dreamweaver. You will also need a image editting program to create any graphics. So it may be worth getting a version of adobe cs4 with photoshop and dreamweaver in it.

Good luck

I would have to agree. most sites are not accessible. By Phone Iphone, treo 650 or treo 700 and more

what about .mobi domain name coming out?

I found the content on midis website quite interesting, and there was way more content than I had leisure to read. Things were also laid out quite intuitively.

Good content, being able to find things, and not having to leave because a site is totally flash-centric ( or because a feature -- like navigation -- wont work in my browser ) beats good design everytime IMHO. Quite often, the sites I find most useful are either minimalist or practically text only. If a source of information, e.g. some kind of documentation, is available either intermixed within a flashy distracting scenescape or as plain black-on-white linked pages, guess what I always pick?

You can follow most of this advice without going completely minimalist. Often it's just a case of getting a good graphic designer for backgrounds/layout, and laying off the dizzy gimmicks. Take any popular site as an example: if it has any of these purported 'bad features', could it work without them? Quite often, it could, and quite often, it wouldn't take a complete -- or even non-trivial -- redesign. Unfortunately, for the most part, subtlety seems to be a forgotton art these days.

I won't claim to follow these rules myself. When I worked in web dev I did whatever the client told the boss was wanted. Flash only sites, blinking images, drop-down menus, recolored links, etc.

I dont believe in flash only sites nor do I believe in blinking images or overly flashy backgrounds, but, simple colors just to meld nicely is a necessity, as it actually hurts my eyes to look at some sites. Unfortunately, I don't believe in plain white pages with black text, but do think that the most near perfect mix I could think of offhand would be wikipedia. Its a nice looking site, not completely void of design, but text is readable. Is that agreeable with your philosophy?

Wikipedia is a nice site.