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Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002
yoey writes "Another famous Nielsen year-end wrapup: "Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines.""
Summary: Every year brings new mistakes. In 2002, several of the worst mistakes in Web design related to poor email integration. The number one mistake, however, was lack of pricing information, followed by overly literal search engines. As the Web grows, websites continue to come up with ways to annoy users. Following are ten design mistakes that were particularly good at punishing users and costing site owners business in 2002.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
This is deliberate and not likly to change.
The less technical a site is the less likly they will have something like this, the reason is that people will click on that and use that to complain about anything. The web people don't want to get customer support problems.
As many people have mentioned, the site hosting this article is straining under the load of geeks looking for more material to turn into running gags. I think I managed to find the reason for this site's poor performance - a lack of high speed internet access.
From Nielsen's Law of Internet Bandwidth (1998):
Nielsen's Law of Internet bandwidth states that:
The dots in the diagram show the various speeds with which I have connected to the Net, from an early acoustic 300 bps modem in 1984 to an ISDN line today. It is amazing how closely the empirical data fits the exponential growth curve for the 50% annualized growth stated by Nielsen's Law.
Starting about 2003, high-end users will have speeds corresponding to a personal T-1 line.
Of course, low-end users will be on ISDN lines in 2003, so high-end users' megabit access will still not sanction bloated design. Looking even further ahead, Nielsen's Law does predict that the Web will be 57 times faster in ten years.
It is amazing how easy it is to get an accurate approximation of the trend of internet connectivity speed from seven data points representing one person's internet connection speed over a span of 15 years.
So the site might not be responding well right now, but at least we get broadband next year...
I'd also like to point out that some webdesigners actually develop websites as a job for real living customers. Who pay them. For making websites look like what they want. Pretty websites. And sometimes those pretty websites require absolutely (does that work as an adverb?) sized tables.
The fact is, browsers are *still* not all behaving the same way, and the only safe way to have a site appear correctly is to use absolute pixels. Stylesheets are nice for simple text styling, but can't even be depended on for font sizes! (Don't believe me? Set up a web page with a style
BODY { font-size: medium }
And see how it shows up on IE, IE for Mac, Netscape, and Netscape for Mac. They'll all be different sizes, last time I checked.)
Since clients want pretty layouts, which includes, necessarily, the use of tables, from time to time absolute pixel widths have to be used.
Our technique for getting around the 100% of 800 = 805 problem is to set the table to 95% instead of 100%, and then center it on the screen. It also adds to the whitespace on the left and right, so it's actually a pretty good thing.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
No they don't. You seem to think that html is a layout language, it isn't. It encodes meaning, nt presentation. Tables are fine for a table of data - but abusing them to get a specific look is only going to frustrate people who care about the semantic information (non-graphical browsers, search engines, summary tools, etc).
If you're still referring to them as "layers", then it's time to take another look at them. DHTML is a useful tool - what should be avoided is DHTML that doesn't degrade gracefully. It isn't an all-or-nothing technology.
PNG in 8-bit mode, with single bit transparency, works in all browsers. That's everything gif does (except animation which is available in .mng). Almost all the browsers have support for 24bit pngs without transparency, too. And, it's very possible to make a CSS site that works in IE5+, Mozilla and Opera 6+. Sure, you have to code around quirks in IE and Opera, but it can be done. IE4 and NS4 are dead. The quicker we can all move along, the better. Those users should view the fact they're not getting fancy pages (but ones that still work) as a sign to move on.
The word markup doesn't mean layout. It can sometimes, but it certainly doesn't in a web development context (or do you think that the 'Markup' in XML is talking about layout as well?)
-- http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=markup
He is a usability expert NOT a design expert.
This is absolutely true, and this is exactly the reason why designers _should_ take him seriously. In fact he explains on his site exacly why his site looks this way. Everybody has his specialism, and a certain task according to his knowledge. He is a usability expert and admits that he isn't a design expert.
The problem is that most design expert don't recognise that they aren't usability experts. Just like they are no networking experts and system administration experts. They trust others to maintain the servers and the network, why can't they just do the same with usability???
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