"Principle 13: Omit Unnecessary Stuff
"Vigorous Web Design is concise. A page should contain no unnecessary stuff, a nav bar no unnecessary choices, for the same reason a sentence should have no unnecessary words and a machine no unnecessary parts."
With apologies to William Strunk and E.B. White.
One of the producers just came in with a redesign proposal for one of our sites. We went over the page, mostly deleting, deleting, deleting, when I recalled some stuff I scraped this morning from Amazon.
Look at the progression of the famous Amazon horizontal nav, the tabs that launched a thousand imitators.
1999
2001
Today, less is more