Creating web design that’s intuitive and easy to navigate through are qualities that web developers continually strive towards in order to maximize traffic and increase usability as best as possible. Those qualities make overall use more enjoyable which, ultimately, plays a critical role in a website’s success. While there are generally accepted conventions, best practices and design trends. For every rule, there is always an exception. Let’s keep in mind that guidelines are not definitive answers. Listed below are rules to break (or at least consider breaking):

Usability should be directed at the “lowest common denominator.”
Web design is, and always will be, about problem solving. The constituency that comprises your user base will be widely disparate, and that’s a good thing. What that doesn’t mean is that the quality of the site and/or its content should be sacrificed in favor of tailoring to the “lowest common denominator.” Give your users some credit and treat them how you’d want to be treated. If it’s worth your users’ while, they’ll figure it out.

Information needs to go above the fold.
“Content is king.” I know. You know. You hear this 94 times a day. It’s the quality and usefulness of your site’s content that will determine the success of your site. While the layout plays a significant part in the effectiveness of your delivery, it doesn’t mean that information needs to be scaled back or, worse, crammed indiscernibly into a single frame. Books have pages that must be turned in order to move backwards and/or forwards, and websites have content that must be scrolled to on and off the screen.

Instructions have to be ultra specific.
I’m not really a Mac kind of guy. Outside of now, I’ve only had to use one once. Despite the lack of incredibly specific directions in the form of a manual, replaced with my sense of pride that renders me unable to ask my more tech savvy coworkers for help, it’s pretty easy to figure out. This same principle applies to the text deployed on a page. At the end of a short teaser for a blog article, there’s no need to have anchor text that reads: “Click here to read this full article.” Something as simple as “Read more” will suffice. There are going to be times where giving users some extra instruction is necessary, but you’ll be able to figure that out on a case by case basis.

Make Your Site’s Goal Obvious.
Something that really gets drilled into the minds of young designers is that a design should instantly tell viewers what they are looking at before they read any text. Brand recognition is important for large corporations, but the smaller guys sometimes need to approach the game differently to attract a viewer’s attention. Be mysterious every now and again. Holding back can intrigue the viewer into wanting to learn more. Applying this technique to web design can greatly increase the time that users stay on your site.

The point of this post is to think outside of the box. It’s not encouraging you to break rules just for the sake of breaking rules. If you do so for the wrong reasons, you’ll probably see mixed results at best. While unconventional design can be dangerous and even damaging to your reputation as a designer, standard convention should be used if there are no better alternatives. If, and when, you do come up with a better way to present something, the choice becomes obvious. So approach every new design with a question in mind, what is the best way to execute this element? Keep the user and their tasks in mind and if you think of a great and innovative way that will improve their user experience, go for it.  Maybe your idea will become the next great design convention. If it fails, you can always fall back on what works for others. When it comes to breaking all the rules, as Robert Francis Kennedy famously said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”