Fitts' and Hick's Laws are what 'real' designers use.
Many big sites such as google use these design laws.
I wrote about it a while ago.
http://www.wouj.com/laws1.htm
To simplify the laws, they basically say that what works best is to have few options and to provide large buttons, ideally in the center on the page.
One of the problems with many sites is people feel they need to put as much as they can onto a page, yet, this could be a huge mistake.