How to build a front page

I don't think this is very coherent. It's basically the author's impression of what works and what doesn't. It isn't really substantiated.

A few examples:

he complains about snipd (first example) having too many colors on the frontpage, yet praises Basecamp (last example) even though they have even more colors on their front page.

Comparing Snipd's service to Google, and saying that Google does a better job of conveying information because they have less of it on their frontpage is a bit too easy. Snipd's service is substantially more complicated and unknown than Googles (seen from a user perspective, of course)

It's not a bad post by any means, it should just stress that these are opinions of the author, and not necessarily what has been proven to work.

Glad you replied - I wasn't quite sure about submitting the comment, since it might sound like a grumpy old man telling the kids to get off his lawn. I see you don't take it that way :-)

And for something jotted up in an hour it's pretty spectacular :-)

Forgive me; this response may be something of a rant.

His methodology is wrong. MySpace is very successful. It's a huge site, very profitable and used and loved by a great many people. So the frontpage obviously works.

It's successful because when it got created, it offered a music service that nobody else did. People joined to revolve around bands. I joined because friends had joined. That said, MySpace had a near-monopoly, and yet it was still beaten by a small college start-up. That's not the sign of a good web site. If MySpace had been better, Facebook wouldn't have had a chance.

You can succeed with a bad front page. That doesn't mean your front page is good. MySpace's is bad, and it's bad in a way that, when it's pointed it, is pretty obvious. (I would draw parallels to Windows, which is in many way very poor, but which is still successful. It doesn't mean that designers should take their cue from MySpace.)

There is no data, there is not even knowledge about why this approach was chosen.

That's a dumb way to look at it. Facebook's intent is obvious. If you want, you can look at the history of Facebook's redesigns and look at which central cues its designs revolve around. It started off with a login space and a large "sign up" button, which was replaced with a registration form.

That said, you don't learn good design through analysis. You learn good design by seeing designs that resonate with you. That's what I was trying to do: I wanted to call attention to the things that most stand out to me in the design of front pages.

If you want to analyse something, then take two items, one of which works and one of which does not. Point out the differences based on data. Then draw a conclusion.

Mark, we've had this exact discussion before, so I'll keep it brief this time. Analysis only goes so far. It's useful, at some points it's necessary, but you don't learn how to make good things by looking at numbers. You look at the things that stand out, and you talk about what's good and what's not good.

I'm a writer. I believe in design as art. We've argued this before: I recall we fought over the guy whose new year's resolution was to make a Youtube video that got 100,000 views, and you said that the number count mattered, and I said that you should focus on making a good video rather than a popular one, and that good things always found their crowd. We have different views on this, and I doubt I'll change your mind because I haven't in the past.

The opinions reflected there are completely subjective, there is not even an attempt at any type of objective comparison between two patterns, to show why one pattern works and one does not.

Objective comparison only goes so far. Web designers spend too much time thinking about this, and it pisses me off because web designers are missing so much and yet they get so elitist about it. Look, at some point pure analytic technique falters, and you need to begin going from your gut. That's not to say there's no process: it's just that the process becomes a question of assessing things on your own rather than falling back on numbers.

Of course, I follow this because I'm a writer, and writing is traditionally the hardest art form to easily assess. You can't objectively compare, say, Ulysses and The Unnameable. Ulysses is maximalist, The Unnameable is minimalist. One uses a hundred thousand different words, the other uses as few different words as possible and focuses on repetition. They're both excellent books. And it's possible, if you're really an anal prick, to create the exact set of rules that each book falls under, to say "There are two schools of design and this is the one and this is the other," but that ignores the fact that there are a million other books that defy those two schools.

The best design is unique. Compare two great things and they will always be radically different in most ways. You can underline the main fallacies (don't be cluttered, don't do such-and-such), but in the end you can't learn by being handed a list of don'ts.

So this post of mine is meant to be subjective. It's me saying "Here's what I've learned, because I've spent five years looking at every web page I go to and taking it apart internally and learning, and here are the things that helped me the most." For me, that helps more than something listing Fitt's Law and discussing things like that. There are excellent articles about those things. This is not meant to be an article like that. This works from the evocative, emotional, even artistic view of design, the view that says "Here is how I, as a critic of front pages, view these front pages, and this is what I like and dislike about them all." In the end, the individual opinion is all I have to offer. I think that it's an opinion with a lot to offer, which is why I submitted it here, and apparently other people thought it was interesting. But we disagree, we know we disagree, and neither of us has anything to gain from arguing about it further because each of us thinks the other is wrong.

Huh! I didn't know what about Friendster. (I was pretty late onto the MySpace bandwagon: only joined in 2005.)

I would suspect that the people who remain on MySpace, however, do so for the bands. The sluttiness has moved its way towards Facebook, at least in my social circle.

On top of that, MySpace was founded by a bunch of people with background in direct email marketing. So they knew all the greyhat techniques for getting users in the door.

The girls just kept them there.