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
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
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%.
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