I’ve never known a rule I didn’t want to break. Just to test it, you understand – determine its limitations, for the safety of all, so it won’t snap under stress and hurt innocent bystanders. Certainly not for the pure love of breaking rules, eh?
One of the lessons I learned at my mother’s knee was that you have to know the rules in order to break them properly. (Mother was a graphic designer.) The rules that are worth breaking are the ones you understand the purpose of – maybe you even agree with that purpose in general. There are plenty of stupid rules for the Web, rules that were put there by people who extrapolated too soon from too small a set of data. Those rules are no fun to break, kind of like removing a tag that says "Do not remove under penalty of law" from a sofa cushion. We won’t bother with those rules today. Let’s go after the rules worth our time and effort.
Given that, here’s my list of Web rules I’d most like to see broken, but only if they’re broken well.
Use small graphics. It’s not that you don’t see this rule broken all the time – it’s just that you so rarely see it broken well. Designers who are transferring their skills from non-Web graphics, especially designers doing their own sites, think that users will wait for a really great graphic. They won’t. They won’t wait for Hieronymous F. Bosch, why should they wait for you? This is not that difficult a rule to break well, if you’re willing to go to a little extra trouble. Here’s what you do: Use all the chops available to you to optimize your graphics, making the file-size small and the image quick to load. (If you don’t know what these chops are, go to Wes Thomas’s Graphic Tips for a lesson.) Then, cut the image up, using Adobe Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or another image-editing tool. The pieces will load simultaneously, and the viewers will at least think they’re getting to see the image faster.
Keep the text short. It’s a truism on the web that people won’t read long text, that reading off a screen is just too icky. I beg to differ. The key to getting people to read long text is to make it interesting, readable, attractive, and (relatively) fast-loading. Easy, huh? Well, off the top of my head, I can think of only one site that throws up tons of long-copy articles every month. (I happen to work there, but I can’t take credit for it.) I’m sure there are others. Let me know about them.
Never remove a page from your site. This rule is from the estimable Jakob Nielsen: Old Pages Must Live Forever. But I confess I’ve gotten accustomed to the mutability of information. What was true last year might not be true this year. Do all our idiocies and indulgences have to live forever on the web? And what about site redesigns? Are you stuck with the old page-names forever? Of course not. The real point here that links want to live. Dead links are Web litter, and you probably have no idea of how many outsider links there are to specific pages on your Web site. All the people who go to dead links are lost eye-tracks. So when a page has outlived its usefulness, what do you do? Leave it in place, where it bothers no one, or replace it with a related page with the same URL. You can also redirect vistors automatically to a page that they might actually want to find themselves on.
Don’t use gifs for text.In the World of the Future, you’ll be able to reliably specify fonts and placement for text you use on the Web, and everybody will see the text displayed as you intend it. The Future isn’t now. When designers new to the Web figure this out, they first scream and thrash about, then they bargain and plead. Then they realize they can set the type in an illustration program, convert it to a gif, and voilà! they have achieved typographic domination of the new medium. Eventually they stop creating new gifs for every headline and go back to thrashing and screaming. Except for logos, buttons, and other graphic elements, real working sites adhere to this rule, simply because life on the Web is tough and only the fit survive. This rule makes life easier. If you’re breaking it – putting up a lot of gif-based text – and you’ve been doing so for more than six months, tell me how you do it.
If you see someone breaking any of these rules effectively, do not call the police. Send me the URL.