Gadgetopia

Web Design Practices:

“Web Design Practices is a site devoted to helping designers understand what design practices are currently in use on the Web”

Lofty goals, but the site makes a good go of it. It’s a survey of the practices found on major sites.

For instance, they surveyed, screen-capped and reported on how “75 leading ecommerce sites” handled breadcrumb navigation. Forty-five percent of the sites used it, 95% were horizontally oriented, and 65% used a right-pointing arrow of some kind as a delimiter.

(Speaking of crumbtrails, why do they show the path back to home? Shouldn’t they show the path behind me, meaning the last X pages I looked at? If I jump around the “tree,” sometimes from branch to branch, then home may not be within three or four clicks. Tribe.net does this. Then again, so does the Back button….oh, forget it — got too caught up in a metaphor there.)