48 Laws of Web Design
48 blunt landing-page rules for startups, with thresholds you can actually check
A numbered checklist of startup web-design rules written by a working designer, stated as constraints rather than principles: headline under 15 words, one CTA per viewport, social proof above the fold, at most two fonts per page, 5-6 nav items maximum, one question answered per section, exactly three steps in the how-it-works block, logo around 40px. It is opinionated about tradeoffs too — pricing must be visible, mobile is the primary view for roughly 62% of traffic, load time can outweigh visual polish, product screenshots outrank illustrations, testimonials with faces outrank text-only, and mixed outlined-and-filled icon styles read as amateur. Useful as a pre-launch pass over a marketing site.
Run this as a review pass after you generate a marketing page, not as a generator — most of its rules are countable (word count, CTA count, font count, nav items, steps) so you can self-check a page against them mechanically before handing it back. Treat the aesthetic claims (dark backgrounds read premium, gradients are back) as dated-on-arrival taste, and ignore its silence on accessibility: several rules, notably the contrast-at-all-costs CTA advice, need a real contrast check on top. Do not cite the 62% mobile figure as sourced.
Why it is here. Landing-page advice usually arrives as vibes; this one arrives as thresholds, which is the form an agent can actually enforce.
- countable, checkable rules
- one CTA per viewport
- three-step how-it-works
- 5-6 nav items maximum
- screenshots over illustrations
Verified 2026-08-15. not fetched by policy — x.com content supplied pre-enriched; classification derived from the supplied full article text
