People are funny like that.....: The Laws Of Web Design

http://ejoh.zmolklife.com/2007/11/18/the-universal-laws-of-web-design/
Published November 18th, 2007

It is my hope that you will find these laws of value. Some of them have been taken from programming laws but as you will see they apply to web design as well. I have ever since I read Murphy’s laws on programming wondered if there are something similar for web design. When I looked it up it turned out it didn’t. A search on Google would only return one article and that couldn’t be reached anymore.

Laws are always fun and I will add more as soon as I come up with them. I do, however, hope that you will help me come up with suitable laws so I wont have to do everything on my own. Any law you submit will off course be credited and published with a link to it’s source.

Anyway, here is the current list of web design related laws:

First Law On System Planning:

· Everything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time to change anything again

The Law of Detail by Carl Drott.

· Nothing is so simple that there is not a stupid way to do it

The Laws On Your Client’s Behavior

· Your client always thinks he knows more about web design than you do

· Your client never knows their or their site’s own good

· No matter how thorough you test your application, when you make your first live install at the customer’s site, it will break

· A site cannot be designed without a purpose and content and your client will give you neither

Hofstadter’s Law

· A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.

Murphy’s Law On Web Design

· Anytime things appear to be going well, you have overlooked something

· You always find any bug in the last place you look and when you’ve found them they’ll appear somewhere else

· You will not find the most annoying bug until you’re heading home from work

· 90 % of the time developing is taken by correcting bugs

· A website is always “under construction”

· The web site will always crash just before the backup is about to be done

· Don’t schedule a vacation to begin right after a release (by Lemming)

· Every project will take at least twice as much time as expected even if you expect it to take twice as much time from the beginning.

· That gorgeous shade of green on your home laptop will look AWFUL on your work PC (by Rachael)

· If everything looks fine in IE it’ll look horrible in FF and vice versa (by Rachael and Amelie)

· It’s impossible to do it right from the start (by Vera)

Wienberg’s Law (general law but applies to web design too)

Progress is made on alternate Fridays.

Metadoktor’s Law of Spelling

· If it can be misspelled, then it will be misspelled

Emil’s Principles

· The most loved design are the ones that don’t exist

· Making a perfect website is not possible as long as its’ intention is to be used

· A design only feel new the first time you look at it

· Unlike how things work in programming every problem is a bug not a feature

· You’re never paid enough money for listening to your client

Emsz‘ Law on Self Criticism

· No matter what your visitors say about your layout, you’ll still find it hideous

Golub’s Laws of Computerdom

· Fuzzy project objectives are used to avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs

· A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned project takes only twice as long

· The effort requires to correct course increases geometrically with time

· Project teams detest weekly progress reporting because it so vividly manifests their lack of progress

Glaser’s Law