This weekend I spent a day at CommunityNext, a set-menu conference with a great line-up. I learned some great things about community, some of which I look forward to sharing during the week in lists.

First up, The Four SkinnyCorp Commandments.

It’s one of the largest sites around. Everybody knows and loves what Craigslist does. But most designers will tell you they don’t like how Craigslist looks.

Here’s the current site, in all its textual, link-happy glory:

In 2004, Charlie Park thought he’d try a redesign. He certainly wasn’t the first to think about it, but his is the earliest I could find. Here’s what he came up with:

The blues went to red and the site gained a little more white space breathing room.

Then about a year ago, a panel at the South by Southwest Interactive conference made a splash with this:

It has even more white space, slightly bigger fonts, and a happier blue link color.

Christian Montoya started with the SXSW redesign, shrank the header and added a whole lot of thin grey lines or borders:

Matt Haughey also worked off the SXSW redesign. Mainly, he thinks “the top bar is all wrong:”

It’s interesting that while all these redesigns attempt to make Craigslist look and feel differently, none really attacked on the information clutter. Of course, that may be because there isn’t a much simpler front page for Craigslist without increasing the number of times their users have to click.

Could Craigslist be a better experience if it looked better or acted differently? Does that mean they should go for it?

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? The biggest reason that Craigslist will probably never consider any of these–or their own–redesigns is that they don’t really need to.

Did I miss any? Let me know if you know of any other Craigslist redesigns.

There’s a really great point in the middle of Nick Harris’ post on creating a pleasant user experience:

Asking users to break their habits in order to use your software is a really tough sell.

He goes on to give some great examples, my favorite of which is breaking the back button. In fact, I’m realizing now that we did just that with the refund project and I’m wondering whether we really had much of a choice.

The point here is it doesn’t really matter if I’ve made a choice based on code efficiency or if I think some convention is wrong. If the program model isn’t in line with the user model, I’m making things easier on me instead of the people who matter.

There are so many aspects to designing for the web, and few of them have to do with pretty colors or flashy graphics. Even though I’m not a designer, even code-pushers have to consider the many areas of design these days.

In addition to graphic design (look and feel) and interaction design (interface and usability), there’s often social design. This summer at Webvisions, Rashmi Sinha said to let people feel the presence of others.

Luke Wroblewski has some notes from a talk at Web App Summit about Learning from social Web Applications. Something that really jumped out at me:

Sites with good social design model the social lives, goals, and interactions of their users.

In other words, you have to emulate real life. There’s a breakdown of the many elements of social design:

motivation, identity, control, independence, privacy, authority, gaming, community, and emergence.

Read the whole thing to find out the details of each element.

I don’t have many problems with online advertising. It supports creators and makes services free. When ads start limiting my experience, as with Portland MetroFi’s free service, I feel differently. Because fast matters.

Broadband is widely available, but that’s no excuse to run bloated ads. Like I’ve said before, I don’t mind most online advertising, but that doesn’t mean I want to wait for it to load. Fast still matters.