Righteous design

Sites with good and notable web design, great HTML examples, good coding, etc.

Personal sites

John M. Lynch’s Web Site is an excellent example of a professional home page done well.

More graceful simplicity: Don Klipstein’s Web Site.

Ian Jackson’s lynx-friendly pages.

How minimalist can it get? Ask John Cowan.

Databases, Magazines and Web Resources

Michael E. Grost’s A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection is one of the best examples of good plain design for an online guide or resource site.

Cardigan Industries have out-McSweeneyed McSweeney’s. Seriously, it’s fantastic design. No wonder, they’re using Textism.

Grunnen Rocks is a web db from the Netherlands of indie rock, 90s to now. They’ve “updated” but the ancient old site design from way back when was simply righteous. [have a peek]

arxiv.org

The gopher-directory style of the etext.org archive (defunct) [archive]

the old wikiwikiweb had and has a simple, straightforward design

Online books

TeX Font Guide is simple and readable and elegant.

WordPress Elegance

Cynthia Harrison’s A Writer’s Diary.

For further reference

A good, well-designed online guide, Building Accessible Websites.

The Easy-2-Read Standard: Five smart rules for on-screen text design (“Don’t tell us scrolling is bad!”)

The Webless Initiative is against CSS, style sheets, “interactivity” and so on. It might not have much of an effect but the ideas are interesting and very often the “webless” design turns out great.

(Browsers should be able to control and present an infinite array of local styles; styles should be controllable not only by the publisher but by the reader.)