Breaking the Rules - A Woman's Point of View

Nearing completion of my portion of the site I'm doing for my wife's friends in their Women's Ministry at our church, I asked her to look at it today to give me her critique... well, she doesn't hate it, but visually, it leaves her cold. Her exact words, "well, If I see a site that looks like that, I probably would say, 'Oh, that's nice' and then never go there again." When I got over being defensive, I asked her to take me to some sites she likes. Here are some of her very favorites: Simple Abundance Susan Branch That's My Home Alexandra Stoddard Fly Lady Network

Here is a larger view of the "Simple Abundance" site:

Immutable 2007 Laws for Websites

1. Landing Pages waste the Visitor's time – if there's only one link – "Enter The Site", it's a very bad thing.
2. You must use a body font that is readable – and this means Arial or Verdana, because they're sans serif, and because they're the only ones found on all Mac, Windows and Linuc Machines. NEVER use a cursive font for body text.
3. Long pages are not cool – everyone knows visitors won't scroll.
4. Web Sites need a hip color pallet. 2 to 3 shades of 2, Maybe 3 complementary colors if you're "avante garde".
5. Spare the use of the human face in photos, especially the eyes – the imagery is too powerful, it distracts the visitor from your message.
6. Keep paragraphs and sentences short and in the active voice. Your visitors will not read text which is more than about 450 px wide, and will not read paragraphs which span more than 5 lines of text.

Hmmmm, I read all the blogs, listen to a coupla podcasts about design. I believe in "Best Practices" and read and obey all rules about what you can't do in a website.

Guess what? According to my wife, "The Law is a ass." So much for the rules. The designers and producers of these great websites decided to do something really, really smart. They decided ignore the rules, they decided to make sites that appeal to a woman's eye and her taste, and decided to feature good writing, not count characters, words, and lines. They decided to make websites that work, and I learned some things from that.

I guess that website's not done at all.