I am of the opinion that publishing a computational method requires a beautiful, or at least usable, web-site. How many times have you found an abstract for a fascinating piece of software or data, only to find that the link is broken, the site is ugly as sin, or explodes into an indeciphirable spaghetti of incomprehensible links?

There is no excuse for this today. There has been plenty written by web designers about what makes a website effective. You only have to make an effort to find it. But for the purpose of convenience, I hereby present my list of things that a scientific software website should have:

1. You need a clear title, rendered in a visually compelling way (big font, lots of white space, prominent at the top of the page). Names give solidity to a website. Suprisingly, some websites bury the name of the program with very poor choice of font.
2. You need a short description of the method. This is a sanity check for people who've just landed on your page from god-knows-where. Give them something to grab hold on to. Unfortunately, this will be a real test of your writing skills as you try to distil a description into a 140 words, or a tweet.
3. On your front page, you should have one compelling example. You can't assume that people who land on your website are all that interested. The job of the example is to convert the curious to someone who will actually download your software. You need compelling evidence that they will not be wasting their time for crappy output.
4. You need a big download button. It's surprisingly hard to find out which link leads to software on many websites. I am talking to you, PyPI.
5. You need to lay out every step of installation (for instance CONCOORD requires you to change the MAXLIMIT of the shell environment – which is buried in the FAQ). Either that or people will pester you with trivial questions by email, or more likely, just give up.
6. You need detailed worked examples that gives every single command, and EXPLAINS every single parameter. I always learn how to use new software by following examples, and then tweaking parameters before I get it.
7. Navigation on every page to at least get you back to the home page.
8. Single columns of about 60 characters. You are not Amazon com, you do not have that much to sell, so keep to the straight and narrow. I can assure you, as a voracious reader of books, reading speed suffers if text is wider than that.
9. Learn about whitespace.

And to show you that I put my money where my mouth is, check out one of my sites.