In July 2004, I published a survey titled These web sites are identical—or are they? As the second part of the title indicates, I suggested at the time that 75% of web design is normative, the rest is merely color and pictures.

The survey compared 10 web sites through elements of their layout: styles, page construction, etc. and identified similarities and differences between well known web sites built by famous, talented designers. Its results were picked up and analysed by the web design blogosphere and by some of its lead members, Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Doug Bowman, Dave Shea or Jon Hicks inter alia.

More recently, I was pleased to notice that the Google Engineering Team found the survey interesting and quoted it on its Web Authoring Statistics page. So did John Allsop, who plans to research further into webpatterns and websemantics (further explanations are to be found in John Allsop’s interview by Luke Wroblewski, and in his conference presentation at the IA Summit 2007 of the American Society for Information Science and Technology). I am also honoured by the mention of this survey by the Aberdeenshire Council.

I have now disconnected from the web design community: I do not read or write about web design anymore, and my skills have begun to rust. This is mainly due to time constraints imposed by my studies. I would very glad, however, to give any advice on how to reproduce and improve my 2004 results in new contexts.

Related blog entries

• Défendre le qualitatif en web design (27 January 2006)
• ‘Semanticizing’ and ‘Patternizing’ the Web: Methodological Remarks (1 January 2006)

Older contributions to Web design

Some of my first Web design articles were published by xrings.net, a francophone Mac OS X community. I also contributed to the Desktop Publishing Boards from 2001 to 2004, focusing much more on conventional design.

I have a lot of old stuff to exhume from archives, but I would need help to update content and publish properly.