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
The cost of a complex system is very, very real
Mitch’s observation
Share This95 percent of the functionality will take 5% of the time to program, and the other 5 % - that which we call “the exceptions” - takes 95%.
17 responses so far ↓
1 elmo // Nov 19, 2007 at 10:45 pm
elmo’s corollary to Nienberg’s Law This Friday is not one of those Fridays.
2 Kaylee // Nov 20, 2007 at 1:42 am
Interesting laws! I like to think of them as guidelines, though
My law for everything: you can never please everyone.
3 Wang // Nov 20, 2007 at 4:53 am
superb….
4 web design newport // Nov 20, 2007 at 5:29 am
IE will always break your design. The amount of brokenness is proportional to the level of perfection of your design as viewed in every other browser and mobile device.
5 Jock // Nov 20, 2007 at 8:52 am
I like Murphy’s Law …A website is always “under construction” …. hehehehe my project never finished.
6 Mitch // Nov 20, 2007 at 10:22 pm
95 percent of the functionality will take 5% of the time to program, and the other 5 % - that which we call “the exceptions” - takes 95%.
7 Kaisa // Nov 22, 2007 at 11:55 pm
I especially like the Murphy’s Law.
“If everything looks fine in IE it’ll look horrible in FF and vice versa”
Couldn’t agree with that more :/ Why can’t all browsers show sites the same way?
8 Raphaele // Nov 23, 2007 at 11:40 am
Well done. But reading all these laws on the same page is a bit painful
And what about this one: “The less skilled a person is about web design, the loudest he/she talks to criticise the design”
9 David // Nov 24, 2007 at 6:10 am
It’s not FF, it’s Fx. And a decent web developer will make it look and behave identically in the two browsers.
Unless, of course, you’re trying to use this new technique of building everything with CSS. Then there are no rules. CSS is great, but it will never beat an old-fashioned table.
10 suraj // Nov 24, 2007 at 4:52 pm
this is cool..i like them very much..this is the way it is…
11 Adrian Restantia » Blog Archive » Murphy’s Law On Web Design // Nov 27, 2007 at 4:31 pm
[…] gasit pe un site legile astea … si mi s’au parut foarte […]
12 Forrest // Nov 27, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Forrest’s Law:
25 to 30 % of your time on a project will be spent coding, testing, and debugging; the remaining 65 to 70 % will be spent in meetings.
13 Forever-Thinking.net » Sinus and Cosinus // Dec 3, 2007 at 11:24 pm
[…] , which was never published because I liked to keep it to myself, has made it into Ejoh’s laws of webdesign after I replied to a topic on Snark. In case you were wondering: (my law on webdesign slightly […]
14 Twitch // Dec 18, 2007 at 12:46 am
Twitch’s Corolary:
Do not publish large updates on Friday afternoons, lest you be working all weekend.
15 Bookmarks Tagged Webdesign // Dec 30, 2007 at 1:36 am
[…] bookmarks tagged webdesign The Laws Of Web Design saved by 1 others nuclearrabbit bookmarked on 12/29/07 | […]
16 Dwayne Charrington // Mar 12, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Very entertaining, but so, so true. Nothing ever goes according to plan you fix all of the bugs, so you think, upload it to the clients server and the client is calling you up 15 minutes later because their site isn’t working.
- Dwayne Charrington.
http://www.dwaynecharrington.com
17 Linux Web Page Design // Mar 13, 2008 at 7:34 pm
Linux Web Page Design…
Extremely interesting post. A little bit different from my point of view but neverless an interesting opinion….
Leave a Comment