Admittedly, this site doesn’t even follow all of them (I keep meaning to do a redesign, but I barely get enough time to make regular posts, as you may have noticed), but a few thoughts on things that make good websites:
If there is a navigation tree, it should have 3-7 items at each level, no more, no less. Nine may be allowable at the highest level, but is never actually necessary.
No one tool / website / page / area should do more than one thing.
One thing is defined as something you can explain in one sentence without a conjunction.
Never try to impress your users with how complicated something is – they will not be impressed, they will leave.
Give the eye room to breath.
Be consistent everywhere.
Once your user has seen the home page, no other page or behavior should surprise them.
You are not all things to all people, your site can’t be either.
On the way home from work, I saw a car with vanity license plates that just said:
WHEE
Awesome. How could you not smile getting into a car with license plates that say WHEE?
On another note entirely, I checked the Minnesota DOT website to see how much customized plates are, because there still has to be some combination like WHEEE or WHEEEE or WEEEEE still left out there that I could get. And I was quickly reminded of yet another way Iowa is better than Minnesota (beyond the selling alcohol on Sundays, selling alcohol in gas station and grocery stores, lower taxes, actually thawing / ice melting during the winter, and, of course, being the Hawkeye State).
In Iowa, personalized plates run you an extra $25, it’s an easy one page form, you can get them for a huge variety of causes, you can get them in your school colors, and you can see what they actually look like before ordering them.
In Minnesota, it’s ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT DOLLARS AND FIFTY CENTS for personalized plates. And you can use their four page long government form to try to figure out how to apply for them (god help you). Now granted, if you look long enough, you can get custom plates in Minnesota for your school, though not in your school colors. They’re right in there with where you get the plates for your Concrete Pumper or your Street Sweeper.
From the files of what the holy fucking bloody hell what were they thinking, comes Green Day the Musical. No, really. They made a musical from the album American Idiot. Now, you may be saying to yourself, “self, I suppose I could see where that might have the vague potential to not be profoundly terrible.” But then you’d see this clip from Letterman…
… and realize that it somehow manages to makes you feel the need to simultaneously laugh hysterically, cry, and just tilting your head to the side and say, wait, wasn’t April 1st like a month ago? Is this a rerun from then? Maybe? Please? No? Shit.
It’s like they tried to collide the awesomeness of Rent and the awesomeness of Green Day and somehow it formed an awesomeness super nova which then collapsed into this complete black hole of suckage that landed squarely in New York and was somehow confused for a musical and placed on Broadway.
And yes, it does actually exist (warning, it starts playing a loud video automatically upon loading, as if you hadn’t already suffered enough).
For the last several months, one of my sisters has been on a serious fitness kick. Not like a, “I’m going to run a 5K by the end of summer,” or, “I’m only going to eat fast food twice a week,” kind of fitness kick. We’re talking regular sessions with a personal trainer, weight lifting, track the exact composition of everything you eat, bulk up, and maybe learn some martial arts style fitness kick. Maybe “fitness kick” isn’t even really the right term for it. “Get in awesome shape quest”? “Fitness rampage”? Something like that.
At any rate, along with all the weight lifting and muscle building, she’s gotten pretty big on protein shakes and whey powder and the like. We went on a brief vacation, and one of the first things we did after getting there was stop by a vitamin store to get some whey powder. This, of course, lead to me making fun of her for the rest of the trip (this is how my family shows affection, we mock each other pretty much all the time). In particular, it made me think of the South Park episode where Cartman decides he’s going to get totally buff:
So he gets a bunch of “Weight Gain 4000″, and gets, well, he ends up like this (starts about 20 seconds in):
So, of course, every time my sister made a protein shake, or asked if it was time for dinner yet, I would reply, “Beefcake. BEEFCAKE!”. This was also accompanied by the Tim Tebow drinking game – while watch college football at any point in the last season, drink any time the announcers mention Tim Tebow. Two if he’s not on the field at the time. Three if neither of the teams playing in the game you’re watching is Florida. You get trashed, fast.
Anyway, after the trip, my sister’s job was getting her down, so I thought I’d send her a care package. What did I think of? Well, I thought I’d get a variety of protein bars so she could try out some different kinds, maybe a few she hadn’t had before:
Titan. Rockin' Roll. Pure Protein. Yep, I picked them for having the most over the top labels and names of the whole rack of bars. Oh, and one chocolate one, because I'm not a total jerk. At least not all the time.
And of course, we can’t show affection without some mocking thrown in, so, while I was at it, I cut a couple of sheets of paper in half and made a few custom labels:
Also a good excuse to play with crayons. I love crayons.
After all, the labels make it easier to put stamps on them…
Pretty sure the post office loves me after this.
So I put her address on the back of the labels like the usual ingredients / nutritional facts label, and went to the post office to get the correct postage for each. The post lady working weighed each one, and then put elaborate combinations of 5 or 6 stamps on each to get the correct amount, to the penny, for each of the four, including mixing up two the weights and going back and doing them over, until basically the entire back of each of them was covered in stamps. The people behind me in line totally loved me by time I left. I then mailed them off, one at a time, over the course of a little over a week.
Pretty sure I should turn this into a side business.
