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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.""
It seems to me that some web designers use it almost like a crutch. As if some needless animation that I have to wait through is going to enhance my enjoyment of a website. If anything, it just makes me want to visit elsewhere.
Our kids are excited about XBox and want to play online, but after visiting the XBox Live site I'm not sure it's going to happen. I spent about 30 minutes poking around on the site and found no information on pricing. This annoys me. I'm not going to buy something to find out how much it will cost.
slashdot broke my sig
lack of real world contact info. sometimes a phone call is required.
Doug
How about sites that code for IE only, and won't display anything, or broken tables, or text layered on top of other text..
It's also annoying when using a high res, small screen, as on a laptop, you crank up the font size in Mozilla or IE and the fixed size tables sites use to do layout make it impossible to read anything. ARGH!
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
11. Lack of line breaks
Jason.
Hmmm, that should be a hard one to do, because a
<tag style="font-size:20px">
should do nothing more than render the font with that height, but still allow it to be resized, my website http://www.andrewvc.com uses this and using mozilla I can resize all the text perfectly.
Unfortuanatly, I just discovered that Internet Explorer 6 does not do and won't let me change the text size. Of what relevance is text in points to a web developer? As usual I expect all trolls to be bash me and tell me to use the standard. Well I don't care, no old people go to my site.
Photos.
OK, this is not the fault of stylesheets. Internet Explorer does not allow the "zooming" of fonts set with pixel sizes. This is a shortcoming of Internet Explorer, not CSS. If this is so important to Nielsen (and I can see why it would be - my vision isn't so great either), perhaps he should look into using alternative browsers (Opera and Moz-based browsers all allow font zooming regardless of how the font size was set).
If you need to voice-quote some obnoxiously long URL, check out tinyurl.com -- it converts long URLs into short temporary URLs.
4 480 becomes http://tinyurl.com/3s1j
Frex, your post's http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=48804&cid=494
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"A tactit commenly employed is to group products by the model name"
Yes indeed, quite annoying. Even more annoying to me is when you go to a site for information about a product, click on the "products" link, and are made to choose between "home", "small business", and "enterprise". I just want to see the products and their specs! Don't worry about why! Just tell me what you've got, and I'll make my own goddam decisions!
Sheesh.
- S
Number three
A home page that is just a logo to click on to go to the real home page. It is often large, slow and adds nothing (good) to the experience
Number four
Flash
I used to feel the same way you do; actually, I still feel the same way you do. When I hit the net, it's usually because I am looking for something particular, and the more hoops/pluggins I have to jump through to get to it, the more unhappy I become.
When I talk to the people that use my site, on the other hand, I find that at least a good number of them like the "ooh, shiney" parts of the web. I've actually had people ask me to restore the flash intro that the guy who ran the site before me made.
I find that splash pages (the ones that link to the "real" hompage) act almost like the cover of a book. People process images much more uickly than they do written words, and a splash page allows you make a more reliable first impression than some other methods; and if you compress your images, there is no reason it should take more than a few seconds to load. A splash page, properly compressed, can come in at under 40k.
I think the hallmark of good design these days is to wrap functionality in a pretty package; make sure that your site is useful/useable, but also make it attractive enough that your users know you care about both your content and their experience.
Thomas Galvin
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
In my experience javascript has rarely been used positively.
It seems MUCH of javascript encourages CRAP web design. People are encouraged to do stupid things and then try to use javascript as a bandaid.
So many sites have javascript practically rewriting entire HTML pages.
Even history.go(-1) seems silly to me. Users aren't stupid - the back button is one of the first things they learn or are taught about when web browsing. Given all the various web technologies, can you give me a good reason why you would need history.go(-1), or any of the history stuff for that matter?
The other thing - you often can have javascript in the link, but still keep a usable href. I don't understand why so _many_ sites require javascript where a simple link will do. I hate this the most. Who cares about not having prices when the links don't even work? Or you can't even see anything on the first page.
Fortunately most sites that require Javascript (or Flash) for access are usually useless - filled with fluff or even lies.
Another thing, many sites that use javascript everywhere including forms appear to have been built by clueless idiots. There are often obvious web security problems with their sites. Easy SQL injection etc.
There are indeed good uses for Javascript, but sadly, excrement has been put to more good uses than Javascript.
Having to enable pop-up adds in Mozilla is a big pain for those websites that refuse to load unless I do so. Fortunately, it is only a very small number of web site thus far.
Yes, I recognise this is how web sites make their money but a discreet advert in the corner of your site is much better than slamming a window in front of your site.