Brochures will never change.

Too often, a website is treated like a brochure, or worse yet, a business card. It’s assembled, distributed and considered done, left to be neglected for a couple years. That’s not what the Internet is for. It’s for current content that you can change on a whim. It’s for uploading early and updating often. It’s always available the world over. Why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that in ways far beyond what’s possible on paper?

It’s the content, stupid.

Though I’m young, I’ve already watched the web grow up. And it’s about time. As more and more people realize the importance of content over Flash and flair, web design has dramatically simplified. Type is getting cleaner, colors are getting brighter and more attention is being paid to function and content. Websites are finally getting the conceptual and verbal attention that strategists and copywriters have been providing to other media for decades. Some people attribute it to Web 2.0. I think it just means our tastes and expectations are maturing. First and foremost, we’re here for information. If a site has nothing remarkable to offer, it doesn’t matter how it looks.

Logo? What logo?

My favorite trade blog put it so simply: “brand = interface.” Yes, of course! Your website is your brand. The whole thing. Not just the color palette or the logo at the top. But content, interface, tone, function… That’s your brand. Marketing and advertising people already think this way. Web developers need to catch up.

Know your place.

Websites still exist — multi-billion dollar websites — that you can click through all day and still have no clue what page you’re on. To me, that’s the greatest failure of web design. We’re not building casinos; we’re presenting information as intuitively as possible. Strip away all your colors, all your fonts, all your applets and Flash if you need to. The single most important thing is intuitive organization. If your site is too hard to navigate, no one will bother to try.

Scrolling is the best medicine.

Sometime in the late 90’s, someone decided scrollbars were evil. This lead to the rise of Flash interfaces and iframes, from which certain industries are still recovering. The fact is, scrolling is the simplest, most intuitive way to navigate digital information. Avoiding it is like handing out a giant poster instead of a book. Don’t get me wrong, Flash is great for embedding video, and iframes for web service integration. But used as interfaces, they reveal a basic misunderstanding of how we digest content.

“Simple contrasts”

Like many design students, it took me a while to gain a strong understanding of typography. One professor was particularly relentless. His mantra was, “Simple contrasts.” Over and over again, day after day, critique after critique, “Simple contrasts.” That tiny phrase is what I remember most about my undergraduate education. What he meant was something like, “express relationships between information as simply as possible.” For example, why use bold, italic, Small-Caps, Underline, and Loose Tracking, when simply bold will do? Yes, style and visual interest may demand complexity. But that doesn’t mean go crazy. Leave that to the uninitiated.

Standards keep us sane.

Imagine trying to write a sentence without punctuation or grammar rules. Then try a paragraph; a page; a book. How soon will you go insane? The Web is in dire need of strong standards support. The world’s most popular browser (and its liberal interpretation of web standards) remains the bane of web developers everywhere. Someday, hopefully soon, we’ll look back and say, “Ha, it was such a pain back then.” Maybe browsers need to coalesce across platforms. In any case, there shouldn’t be any mysticism to writing reliable code. The best we can do for now is test and validate, rinse and repeat.

The best things are free.

Every server I’ve willingly used has run free software — free as in beer and free as in speech — all backed by enormous, international communities of experts and enthusiasts. Frankly, it’s unbelievable what you can get on the Internet for free. Why? Because people are so passionate about it. They want to share and contribute and see the whole thing succeed, right down the biggest, most successful web company of them all.

The Web is also full of free services, ripe for the integrating. Applications are moving online and their APIs are being handed out to anyone. Suddenly, there’s no code to maintain. No software to update. No hosting to buy. Just a torrent of web services that are starting to converge. What an exciting time to be open and online.