The final result is 10 sites that I feel are the best combination of both good design and usability. The list is in no particular order. 

1) Cork’d – I absolutely love Cork’d. If I had to pick one of the sites on the list that I like the most this would probably be it. I love everything from the rich color shemes to the fun illustrations. The design is both classy and fun at the same time. Not only is the site one of the best looking, it’s also very user friendly. I instantly know what the site is about and how to use it. Cals to action are very clear. Congrats to Tundro (which I also love) on a great job.

2) Newsvine – Newsvine is a social news site, a place to read, write, discuss, and share news. Green is a hard color to design with, but Newsvine has done a fantastic job. It looks great with the grey/silver color combinations. Newsvine is easy to navigate. Most news sites place the main navigation on the left, Newsvine placed it on top. This makes it easy to see all the different sections at the same time. They’ve also done a great job bringing out the content.

3) digg – Another one of my favorites. Not only is digg one of my favorite designs, it’s one of my favorite sites period. digg’s design does a great job at encouraging user participation. The content is clearly defined and each news story is seperated cleanly. Everything of importance really stands out. The only thing I would change on digg’s homepage is moving the category navigation above the friends’ activity, I think category navigation is more important. Digg was redesigned in September of 2005 by the guys at silverorange.

4) Blurb – Blurb offers book publishing software so anyone can create and design a book. They’ve really done a great job with the design, it’s very captivating. It’s easy to tell what the site is about from any page you’re on.. The content really stands out against the rich background and the typography is outstanding. You would think that maroon, orange, green, blue, and yellow would be a very tough color scheme to work with, but they managed to make it look great.

5) FireFox – I think this is actually the third post in a row that I’ve mentioned FireFox. I can’t help, they just do so many things right. Is there a website that does a better job of explaining the product and giving a clear call to action?

6) 9rules – 9rules is a blog network that’s all about community. The site is all about the content and they’ve done a great job bringing it out and making it very accessible. They’ve accomplished the lofty goals of featuring member content and getting people to read deeper into the community. The community sections page is also very well done, everything from the clearly defined categories to the favicons which really gives the page some flavor.

7) Snap – Snap offers a new, different way to search. They have a very clean homepage and yet it looks great. What I really like are the interior pages, specifically, the search results. It’s laid out in two columns. The search results are on the left. On the right side is a window where it displays the site when you click on the results. You can actually navigate through the site in that window as well, or click a link to open the site in a full window. I like this a lot but I know there’s a lot of people that don’t, it seems you either love it or hate it.

Simply Hired – Simply Hired is simply easy to use. The bright colors used in combination make for a fun color scheme. The home page is super simple to use, it’s fool proof, Google style.

9) Blogger – Who would’ve though Blogger, a Google product, would ever make a list for best web designs? I guess with Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path being a part of it that should come as no surprise. They’ve actually really done a nice job with it. Vey clean, fun, and user friendly. If it’s my first time on the site I know exactly what they’re about and how to complete any given task. Searching for blogs is simple and they’ve done a good job of displaying the results.

10) Pandora – I was a little torn on adding Pandora to the list. They don’t have the best looking site, but then again it’s not bad. What I love about the site, besides the actual product itself, is how usable it is, and I can do it all right on one page.

What are some of your favorites?

Jakob Nielsen is a Web-design guru who has spent years advising companies about how to create attractive and easy-to-use Web sites. Lately, he has been thinking about other ways that companies reach out to customers, like blogs, RSS news feeds, newsletters and more.

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You hear a lot these days about RSS news feeds, which is the software technology behind blogs. What do you think of them?

People who are in the field often use the term ‘RSS’ [Really Simple Syndication] to refer to ‘news feeds’ because that’s the name of the technology. But in one of our studies, 82% of those we surveyed did not know what RSS meant. It’s not something that the general public knows about. So if you are targeting business executives, or even if you are doing something for the general public, they are not likely to understand that particular term. Even if they are actually using the technology. So one of the real strong recommendations is to stop calling it ‘RSS’ and start calling it ‘news feeds,’ because that explains what it does.

You say you like traditional newsletters emailed to customers instead of news feeds. Why so? Don’t they contribute just as much to information overload?

The best ones don’t. With the best ones, it’s like a service you are waiting for and expecting. The email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That’s the great strength.

The best newsletters really drive customer relationships. But they have to be very good, very targeted to a specific user’s actual needs. And it’s got to be very timely as well. For example, one newsletter is called ‘Your Baby This Week,’ and is targeted at new parents and, in particular, new mothers. It talks on a weekly basis of what you can expect for your new baby. That is something that is extremely relevant, so people really look forward to getting that particular newsletter. Unless a newsletter is very good, people will just say, ‘Oh no, more information.’

Can’t blogs do the same thing?

Certainly you can have blogs that function as newsletters, updated on a regular basis. But they don’t tend to do that. They don’t tend to have that same sort of publishing discipline: having a publication schedule and surveying this week’s or this day’s events. They could, of course, but they don’t tend to.

What you are saying is heresy to some bloggers, who insist it’s very important to use blogs to have a “conversation” with customers.

That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction. A much larger part of the population is not into that so much. The Internet is not that important to them. It’s a support tool for them. Bloggers tend to be all one extreme edge. It’s really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users.