Smashing Magazine: 10 Principles of Effective Web Design

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/index.php/2008/01/31/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/
"Usability and the utility, not the visual design, determine the success or failure of a web-site. Since the visitor of the page is the only person who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, user-centric design has established as a standard approach for successful and profit-oriented web design. After all, if users can’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.
We aren’t going to discuss the implementation details (e.g. where the search box should be placed) as it has already been done in a number of articles; instead we focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches for effective web design — approaches which, used properly, can lead to more sophisticated design decisions and simplify the process of perceiving presented information.

Please notice that you might be interested in the usability-related articles about 10 Usability Nightmares and 30 Usability Issues we’ve published before,we’ll cover more principles of effective design in our following posts. Therefore you might want to subscribe to our RSS-feed.

In order to use the principles properly we first need to understand how users interact with web-sites, how they think and what are the basic patterns of users’ behavior."