Software developers often have no idea about design. In fact, most of your marketing team too won't have any idea about design. As a result, projects often don't look too good. Yet there are four basic principles of design that you can teach to anyone, and they are detailed in

DON'T MAKE ME THINK, by Steve Krug Don't make me think The basic principle of web design is that the user shouldn't have to think. It means that as far as is humanly possible, when I look at a Web page it should be self-evident, obvious, self-explanatory. Hence, the site

One of the best principles to apply throughout a company is the KISS principle. Yet what is simplicity? This short book by John Maeda answers that question. THE LAWS OF SIMPLICITY, by John Maeda There are 10 laws of simplicity.  They fall into three flavours (three increasingly complicated conditions of

Another great book by Seth Godin! THE BIG RED FEZ - How to Make Any Web Site Better, by Seth Godin The pachinko machine theory of web business A website is like a Japanese pachinko machine.  Plenty of balls (traffic) come in at the top of the machine.  The challenge

UNLEASHING THE IDEAVIRUS, by Seth Godin The decline of interruption marketing Marketing by interrupting people isn't cost-effective anymore.  You can't afford to seek out people and send them unwanted marketing messages, in large groups, and hope that some will send you money. Instead, the future belongs to marketers who establish

David Ogilvy is one of the most famous advertising wizards of all time. Written in 1983, his book Ogilvy on Advertising is one of the most important reference books that we use at Binary.com to design advertising campaigns. It contains a number of easy-to-apply rules that are really well-worth

CHANGING THE CHANNEL, by Michael Masterson and MaryEllen Tribby About the authors - Michael Masterson is a successful entrepreneur who has overseen the launch of numerous companies that have grown to multi-million dollar businesses.  Mr Masterson helped launch EarlytoRise.com and is a consultant to Agora Inc., a leading direct

37Signals (now called Basecamp) is a Chicago-based web application company, famous for having invented the Ruby on Rails web application framework, and the "Getting Real" philosophy, amongst other things.  37Signals are one of the most highly respected authorities on web usability, web design, and web application development. Defensive