by Luke Wroblewski February 18, 2013

In his presentation at An Event Apart in Atlanta 2013 Jeffrey Zeldman walked through today's web design principles and how they can make our sites better. Here's my notes from his talk: Ten Commandments of Modern Web Design.

Thou Shall Entertain.

We spend lots of time thinking about efficiency and usability but we also need to think about being delightful and entertaining people.

Headlines and visuals play together. Consider how images can add life and clarity to your content pages.

Stock photos might not be the best answer, illustrations and icons naturally come with a unique personality. Stock photos often do not.

Error pages are an opportunity to insert personality. Try to be entertaining but be mindful of people’s mindset when an error occurs. Fun is not appropriate everywhere.

Test Everything

People are using your Web sites on lots of different devices, you need to test on these devices. There is no substitute for using real devices to test.

This is nothing new as we used to test on different browsers when building websites.

Remote Preview is a tool that allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously.

Don’t just test your designs and sites, also test your assumptions.

A List Apart didn’t include an ALT tag on author bios because they felt it was the best decision for accessibility. This goes against convention but it’s important to keep trying different things.

Test your assumptions by publishing your intent and ideas. Encourage discussion about them.

Thou Shall Iterate

Iteration is how design happens: “I move stuff around on the page until it looks right” -Milton Glaser.

Iteration isn’t just for visual design. It also helps you uncover insights.

A List Apart found people are often commenting and re-tweeting articles before they read them. They learned this by iterating on where the share and comment links exist on the page.

Thou Shalt Ship

Good is the enemy of great. Great is the enemy of shipping.

Not shipping can be soul-crushing. You need to get your designs and ideas into the world.

Consultants, raise you rates when clients don’t ship. This encourages clients to get the work you do together out and into people’s hands.

Engage Thy Community

Instagram lost a lot of public support when they changed their terms of service without explaining what they were doing and why to the community. Its most passionate users were upset about these changes and caused a big uproar.

Big companies care about customers too but they often are less connected to their users than small companies.

Thou Shalt Prioritize

Make sure you are focusing on the most important things at any given time.

Force yourself to make decisions -not everything can be a priority.

If you try to make things without prioritizing, you won’t ship.

Kevin Hoffman has written a series of articles about effective kickoff meetings that highlight the importance of prioritizing work.

Additional Commandments