What are the elements of a well designed web site?

This blog post does a good job of breaking down the design of the two sites and using this to highlight some important aspects of what makes the Apple site ‘well designed’ As a number of the comments point out it is a bit of a Mac lov’ in but the principles are worth considering.

I like point 1 about simplifying the home pages down to navigation and small number of easy to focus on items. And point 2 about the value of flow is also interesting. The classic design flaw in most Intranets is trying to cram a lot of stuff on the homepage because everything is import. The result is often a cluttered mess which leaves many users confused.

Apple vs. Microsoft - A Website Usability Study