List of Creative Non-Flash Websites Which Aren't Boring

When looking for new and exciting websites, I check out the webby award sites, including older years -
http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/

which also has a "Non-Flash" category listed. Here is 2008 -

http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=12

As a technical designer one of my fave sites has long been Crate and Barrel's ecommerce site because of the structure, and clean look'n'feel (and their use of the golden mean/ aka golden rectangle)

http://www.crateandbarrel.com/default.aspx

I believe they design the site themselves - because of postings such as this one in Northbrook, IL.for a Senior Internet Art Director at Crate and Barrel - http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/4380
In part I am impressed with their work because it was early on one of the best ecommerce sites I reviewed in a study I did for Microsoft in 2003 to discover best practices in UI / UX for an internal product.

IMHO - (ha ha) - it is frequently good to have a "boring" yet clean site design if what you want people to look at is the content - there you can have the exciting stuff. Look at Reuter's site today for just one example -
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE48O77420080925
it's the photo of Marilyn Monroe that makes it exciting!

Also look at the differences in http://www.CNN.com 's site over for example the http://www.MSNBC.com site - their users are different - the MSNBC appears to draw a hip younger crowd now, often with many more comments on technology articles and far fewer photos of dogs dressed up as clowns. (ok, ok, when I need a laugh I check out this year's winner in the Weird catagory - http://icanhascheezburger.com)

So when you get right down to it, we come full circle back to the USER. Who is your USER? What do you want to provide for your USER? How can you do that effectively?

Because there are some sites I consider very interesting, very exciting, or challenging that are not for general use - they serve very specific users, including sites critical of webdesign itself. Not that many people want a site to take over their browser – a browser - which is itself a boring framework - a boring design itself - (think Google Crome) - but can present some genuinely astonishing stuff!

Love ya! Don't ever change!