Important Lesson from “The World’s Highest Website”
Jens O. Meiert, January 6, 2007 / October 5, 2008.
This entry is filed under Web Development, Marketing, Design.
In October, I launched the infamous CSS “experiment” The World’s Highest Website, which won almost two million visitors until now. I do not want to talk about sense or nonsense, intentions, processes, technical issues, whatever concerning the site now, but one other important thing, namely design. Consider this digg comment from “forgiste”:
I made a website a mile long (during the whole pixel ad craze. I decided against using it for that purpose, but never took out the line of text that says I would) a while back and somebody dugg it, but it never made it to the front page.
[…]
Now please compare both sites. Obviously, the three linked lessons are (forming the composite, aforementioned important lesson):
- Goals: Set high goals. Classic.
- Communication: “Slather” anyway. “The Mile Long HomePage” vs. “The World’s Highest Website”. Paul Arden (The World’s Best Selling Book) would like that, I guess.
- Design: Every message needs its form. No need for explanations, as long as you have both sites on screen or at least in your mind.
And one important bonus that actually induced this post: Always keep in mind Edward Tufte’s “Compared to what?”. It’s always useful and can be applied almost everywhere.
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Comments
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On April 17, 2007, 8:44 CEST, Chaz Forgiste said:
Wow, I can’t believe I’ve been written about! By the way, the mile long homepage was literally just a spur of the moment thing. Your thing is a lot cooler. I’m in the process of finishing up the redesign of my real site, marvngrad.com. I’ve got the styling down pat on Gecko based browsers, but due to laziness I’ve yet to make a separate CSS file for IE.
