I must admit that I felt like I had found a kindred spirit when I came across this post. For those that don’t know, Jakob Nielson is a usability expert, and those of us in the website industry would be wise to listen to him. He has written several books, and is no doubt an expert in the field, but his website has been a source of criticism for several years.
Like Ryan, the author of the post, I also was smitten by Mr Nielson’s site—the simplicity was refreshing, and still is. The markup is a little dated and it’s certainly not perfect, but it remains a shining example of what HTML was intended to be: marked up text. It contains no animation, no video, no bells and whistles, and hardly any graphics at all. It is not beautiful design; it is beautiful simplicity.
What happens when you add good design (not glamour) to simplicity? You get sites like this and this. Oh yeah.