Your reading this means you have a feeling, however strong, that all well designed websites are based on well defined website design rules. That feeling you have is correct. Good website design must have solid website design rules to promote a more consistent, natural, and pleasant experience for the audience. Having gone through the same process of defining those design rules for our sites, I want to share how one may set these rules and the debates that one must have if any of these rules are to be bent or broken.

Web design rules are important for a consistent, natural, and pleasant experience. Pleasant is understood as something that is aesthetic to the site's audience. This would include proper use of white space, grouping of related areas, and how well the contrast and colors work together. What, then, are consistency and naturalness? Consistency is using the same mechanics everywhere so the audience quicly feels at home in a new environment (read: new website or tool). The audience is intelligent enough to find a pattern, but it behooves the designer to make that pattern easy to find. Set rules for which colors will be used, what text fonts and sizes will be used, what the menu options will read and where they will show up, and so on. On the other hand, naturalness would yield the interface decisions to how the audience is prone to doing things. For example, the largest natural behavior in reading material is that people read things top down, and within that top-down swipe they may read left to right. Those of use who have read comics growing up may be used to reading boxes side by side but that is an assumption a designer must intentionally choose to make. Another example of natural behavior is our idea behind PoP Project that since people naturally remember around seven things, how can project management be more complex than that and hope for success? (http://paradigmpop.com/node/46 to read more on that). How about the idea that the audience is prone to naturally scanning without scrolling, resulting in the conclusion that we should not have important information below the fold? A consistent, natural, and pleasant experience is a designer's onus to her audience, the set of which require a few solid web design rules to be set by that designer.

Yet there are times when these well set website design rules must be bent or broken, since at times they will conflict with each other. One rule that we had to break was to never have more than one column (we had set this rule for a more natural experience). Although the full heated debate we had over bending that rule is the topic of a later exposition, I would like to point out that we did fight each other at length on the question of whether we could break this rule. On the one hand, rules are rules and are therefore inviolable. Still, at times one may feel the need to break one of the rules set. At this point, all other options must be considered and exhausted. If the issue that requires the rule bent still stands, a full debate on breaking that rule must be held. Bypassing this long process of breaking rules will result in a lack of consistency for your audience which can very soon lead them to discomfort on your website or tool. Hence, all changes to rules must be made as a last resort and even then the violations of the rule must be minimal.

With set website design rules, a more consistent, natural, and pleasant experience is proffered to the audience. Certain situations may arise where solutions satisfying one rule may bend or break another, but these solutions must be debated at length if they prove unavoidable.