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.""

Comments

Re:They missed one...

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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.