This article was written in 2013. It might or it might not be outdated. And it could be that the layout breaks. If that’s the case please let me know.

What is a perfect website?

Today I tweeted a link to a small presentation about the fact that on many devices you can’t see icon-fonts because @font-face isn’t supported. I also tweeted The fact that many people can’t see your icon-fonts, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them. Just make sure they still get the message and It doesn’t have to be perfect. There’s no such thing as perfect on the web. Perfect only exists in theory. But then I thought about the meaning of perfect a little more, and I came to the conclusion that perfect does exist on the web. It just means something else than we’re used to.

When I think about a perfect website, the first though is something that looks fantastic in every detail. But I don’t think that’s the correct definition of perfect on the web. I think a perfect website is a website that’s accessible to everybody who visits your site. So a well written, well structured site in plain HTML without any styling is perfect according to this definition. It doesn’t necessarily look good, but everybody, no matter the device, browser or input method can use it. The whole trick of web design is to add styling, and add fancy features while keeping the website accessible to 100% of your visitors. Your site stays perfect as long as this percentage stays at 100%.

This doesn’t mean that it has to look good for everybody. It means it has to be usable for everybody.