Jason Fried over at 37 Signals tells us Why the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web.
The strength of his opinion rests in the collective power of all the points he makes. This makes sense, since it’s all about the details with design.
Here are the main points, read the full post for the meat:
Staying power
It’s straightforward
It’s unique
This is important
It’s good cluttered
Breaking news is breaking news
One guy can run it
No news is the news
It sends people away to keep them coming back
It’s fast
It’s cheap to maintain
It’s one page
It makes him a great living
One of the pieces I found the most interesting is something I’ve forgotten about regarding the ‘stickiness’ of a site:

There’s actually no content on the Drudge Report. Well, sometimes he will post an email or a memo on his site, but it’s 99% links out to other news sources. His site is designed to send you away to bring you back. The more often you hit his site to go somewhere else the more often you’ll return to go somewhere else again. You visit the Drudge Report more because you leave the Drudge Report more. This is one of the secrets to building traffic: The more you send people away the more they’ll come back.