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As Web design become more of a science and less driven by inspired guesswork, the Web's top sites are converging. Already they share many design features. Through analysing this convergence we can come up with a set of 'best practice' guidelines, based on the principle that if the Web's most successful sites do things a certain way, there's a good chance it's the best way to do it.

Since Web designers are rebels at heart, it's unlikely that anybody will turn these guidelines into firm rules that must be slavishly obeyed. But in any art form, rebellion usually works best when you know the conventions and are aware that you're breaking them.

So let's define a few. Let's look at fonts, colors, links, navigation, titles, page width, JavaScript, CSS and file size.

The Top Ten

Top 10 Web Properties AOL Time Warner Yahoo! MSN Microsoft eBay Amazon Lycos About-Primedia Google Walt Disney Internet Group

First, where do we get our top ten Web sites? Listings of the most visited Interenet properties (multiple sites owned by a single company) are offered by Nielsen/NetRatings, and by Jupiter Media Metrix. The list on the right is from Nielsen/NetRatings for the week ending December 2, 2001. The Jupiter list was very similar. The sites were analysed in December 2001.

For each of these properties we looked at the main home page, or, if there was a choice of home pages, at the most well-known, notably aol.com for AOL Time Warner, about.com for About- Primedia, and disney.com for Walt Disney.

Home pages are unique in their purpose and sometimes unique in their design, especially when it comes to navigation elements. Yet one of the surprising results of this top ten review was the amount of similarity between home pages and inside pages, even to the extent that a useless home page link was included on the home pages of six sites, simply for consistency.

One thing you can be sure of is that home pages are designed with a great deal of care and attention, probably more than goes into any other single page, so in that sense they do represent the best of a company's current Web design philosophy.

AOL: Verdana Yahoo: default MSN: default Microsoft: Verdana eBay: Arial and some default Amazon: mix of Verdana and default plus a little Arial Lycos: Verdana About: Verdana and Arial Google: Arial Disney: Verdana (but not much text on the page)

Main Font

Verdana is a comfortable winner. This sans-serif font was created by Microsoft specifically for the Web and is generally regarded as the easiest to read. Ariel is a much older font and very similar to Verdana. It's the second most popular in our top ten. Finally, a couple of sites (including MSN) use default font, which is Times Roman, a long-established font still used in the majority of hardcopy book publishing.

AOL: white Yahoo: white MSN: white in main area, blue elsewhere Microsoft: white in main area, blue elsewhere eBay: white Amazon: white Lycos: white About: white Google: white Disney: blue

Background Color

White, white, white, and just a touch of blue. Disney (blue) is the odd one out, but then it's the odd one out in more ways than one, with its highly visual approach and inclusion of Flash. For regular sites in the top ten, a white background is unquestionably the most popular. None of these white sites leave it to chance by assuming your system is set to give white as the default background color, they specify white.

AOL: mainly blue, but also many other colors Yahoo: mainly blue (from links) plus a small amount of various other colors MSN: mainly blue, plus variations on faun/green Microsoft: predominantly blue eBay: mainly blue and yellow Amazon: red with variations on pale orange, plus blue from links Lycos: blue with some yellow About: red, plus purple from links Google: blue, plus the multicoloured logo Disney: blue, with a little yellow and orange

Color Scheme

Blue is the clear winner, though in some cases only due to the multitude of default links. Amazon and About are the exceptions, using a red base. About doesn't use blue at all, which helps to give it a unique look. All ten sites use more than one color (ignoring white).

Ten Top Sites Compared - Page 2