Recipe for a Successful Website
by Nathan Shedroff

An edited version of this now appears in the Dutch book, Website Graphics Now

Listen up, this one's a no-brainer. Building a successful website is as simple as an Easy-Bake Oven™. Although it's a lot of hard work, it isn't very difficult to understand. The directions are clear.

Here's the list of ingredients-and there are only six:

Content
Information Design
Performance
Compatibility
Visual Design
Interaction Design

Each of these ingredients is important and not one can be left out. Would you leave out sugar in a cake recipe? Would you bake bread without yeast? Of course not, but that's what 95% of the websites on the Internet are doing-especially the commercial sites where it is even more important. Most sites serve up pages like half-baked cookies without everything necessary to make them delicious. They usually get the sugar in there but they often forget even more essential elements like flour and water, making their servings hard to swallow and even more difficult to stomach.

A successful website might be able to get by with only five of these ingredients-if they are exceptionally strong and well-crafted-but you can't expect a site to attract diners unless all six courses are served, especially as the competition in the market heats up.

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Copyright 1994 Nathan Shedroff