Top 5 best designed websites
I did the worst earlier so only fair I do the best. Here’s my list of the five best websites on the internet today. I could have easily listed 50 here but I have done a Simon Cowell and ruthlessly pared it down on many different selection criteria. Clearly opinions will differ, feel free to reply to either of the posts and tell me what think is worst and best of the web today.
1 My Winner
http://www.loadedsmoothies.co.za/
Well crafted flash site that is perfect for this South African company’s image and feel. I felt good after leaving this site it actually improves the way you feel which is what the product is all about. Way better than the UK’s innocent smoothie site which is simply boring in comparison. When you mouse over the bee it smiles at you as well as tracking the vertical movement of the mouse. Mouse over the sun and its eyes wiggle about. The paper ball animation and tilted text on paper all very clever stuff indeed. Worthy winner but the rest are just as good and I did say it was a very difficult choice.
2 Good Second
Another great Flash site that made me feel good. German author this time has little birds twitting as the clouds float past in the background. Like a game the kids would like, click on images and stuff happens. Love the well done illustrations in particular the scarecrow. The making of the cereal bar advert section is so very well done. They have games, wallpapers and MP3′s to support the product.
3 Amazing Third
Award winning online news channel of the year. Visually appealing and great content. As I always say “content is king”, throw in good layout, huge production staff and easy navigation and you have an award winning website every time. I have the sky news gadget running on my desktop at all times. If a story breaks I know about it right away. Best of its type by a country mile. News Channel of the year 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008.
4 Fourth
Formed in January 1999 yet another best of breed award winning website. Good navigation and crystal clear layout. Loads of relevant content which is very focused on the sites purpose. Absolutely no dilution of the core message. A bucket of rich content including videos, photography and interactive forms. Easy to understand why these guys are number one at what they do with over 12 million unique visitors per month. The Monster network consists of local content and language sites in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, France, India, Singapore as well as other countries.
5 Fifth
Could easily have been my number one choice. This page is simple perfection despite the fact the page is not W3C compliant and has 52 errors when I last tested the page. These errors are deliberate and in the main to do with browser compatibility. But this plain little page processes over a billion search requests a day. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sat looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘What’s up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem they added the Google Copyright message as an end of page marker. The Google home page can be set up to display in 88 different languages including Scots Gaelic and Klingon. Has to be in my top five.