Many other criteria have been used in the evaluation of sites. The most common is a listing of sites by the number of daily visits by surfers. Many useful manuals, such as Lynch and Horton's Web Style Guide (Yale University, 1999), emphasize functionality. Such guides are basic references for site development. But the thesis of SiteIdeas is that they overemphasize purely practical concerns. A visit to one of Lynch and Horton's favorite sites (Yale-New Haven Hospital) will illustrate the problem.

The accompanying pages divide sites into commercial (business), institutional, and special interest. Often these categories overlap, and many more categories might be defined. Two common ones for which we do not provide examples are "plain text" and "personal" (family). Since plain text sites offer documents to the viewer without any attempt at style, they raise few design issues except legibility and ease of access. Personal or family sites are of many kinds. Although their design is of interest to SiteIdeas (see the accompanying model sites), it is not appropriate to provide links to existing sites of this kind as illustrations of design.

We also include a page offering access to what are labeled "disappointing sites". Such sites can be of great practical use to surfers, but from a design viewpoint, they fail to live up to the potential of the web. The first three disappointing sites in our list were easily selected from the short list of most visited sites according to a recent New York Times (August 26, 2000, page 18NE).