3 big questions all web designers should be familiar with:
Where am I? What can I do here? Where else can I go?
Web designers should design sites that answer those questions for visitors. But it’s easier said than done, and as a result, it’s unfortunately all to often that many large web sites are more like forests than cities.
Surfing the web, looking for web design blogs, I stumbled upon something so simple and yet so effective in dealing with this problem; a gem of an item on the About Us page of a Graphic Design tutorial site (http://www.graphic-design.com/about.html ). It’s an overview of the things that you can do on the web site, in bullet points, and with the action verbs linking to the respective pages. 
Now the site itself is not all that impressive, from a design or an architecture standpoint. There’s a whole lot of information available, but it’s hard to find your way around…in other words, it’s easy to get lost. Which is perhaps the reason this overview of the site was included.
It does an excellent job of communicating what the site has to offer. It is succinct, but not terse, and it talks to me, telling me what I can do there, rather than what one might do. This goes a long way towards making me feel comfortable in the environment.
The web has come so far, technologically speaking, since I’ve been browsing, but it’s nice to see that the simple things can still have great impact. There’s no Ajax, or DHTML here; no draggable elements, or expanding/collapsing drawers; no semi transparent floating divs, or animating elements. It’s just a plain old static HTML list, thought out, and done right. And it accomplishes everything it sets out to do.
Really…? Do you really believe this is good? I agree with you that the 3 questions you pointed out are critical to designing a web site, but the list is a little on-the-nose, dontcha think? The “design” part comes in when you’re able to answer those questions intuitively, through well-thought-out navigation, clean layout and clear communication. And straightforward support when needed. (this list is a little cutesy)
I personally don’t find the list helpful at all. It’s a very long list and sort of hard to tease apart — 16 bullets with really tight line spacing. The words they’ve chosen to link don’t accurately communicate where you’re going to be sent (e.g., “here”), which makes the list technically inaccessible and hard to scan. And do I really need to be told what to do with the home page…?
I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I bet you could have found a much better example of it. I think a site map/index would have been much more helpful for this web site, if their intent was really to help people get around. Or an FAQ, if this is a substitute for “help”. This list just doesn’t do it for me. They should have put the effort into user testing different nav schemes, card sorts, etc. instead of this creative writing exercise.
Agree with Brenda. Look at some of those link titles! Hardly scannable or setting expectations of the link destination! The labelling of the site’s content areas leaves quite a lot to be desired to. “&Else” anyone?
Also there is more than a little irony involved here – a graphic design site that isn’t so hot on navigation! Curses!
DJ