I was using a web application yesterday and was stunned how dopey the design was. The search yielded irrelevant results, tables of data were poorly formatted with vanishingly small text, meaningless icons littered the page and I couldn't figure out the menu system.

A web application for me is a web site that contains information you want and generally does stuff. While it is true to say all web sites do something, product 'brochure' sites typically only waste your time with Fancy Dan flash animations and the like. Look and feel is important of course but not to the detriment of accessing the information you're interested in. Some 'good practice' basic design examples include:

• Good text contrast, size
• Good resizing
• No needless menu duplication
• Contact information easily accessible
• 'Top' anchors throughout long pages

Things I would like to see more widespread concerning the more application-leaning sites include:

• All text at least 1em for readability
• Subtle Colour coding of sections
• System messages in same place, persistent if possible
• Message severity colour-coding
• Sectioned search results
• History - preferably every action with associated links, time stamps etc.
• All tables of data sortable
• Tables have adjustable length
• Ajax inline editing where possible. Editing text has always been a case of 'there's the text I want to change - I can see it. I wonder how I can get to it?'
• A phone number at the top of every page
• Search results which include menu titles - Drupal (this site) seems to require 50 clicks and 3 blind alleys before revealing a menu option.

Here's a diagram showing the simplest layout I could imagine. I used Dia for this - a good albeit buggy and limited open source (pronounced 'free'), multi-platform vector diagramming tool.