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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.""
You really should wait for the page to load, though. The cartoons there are pretty spiffy...and I'm not just saying that because they were drawn by my wife. Cough.
I think we should be much more worried about the trend in using flash for everything. I've seen sites that have whole link bars, with no special effects that warrant it, done in flash. Isn't that' what an href is for?
I do a lot of web developing and I've come realize that a lot of things that I want to do cannot be done without having Javascript in the link. While it is sometimes annoying when I'm browsing a site and cannot directly link to a page because they use a POSTed form inside of a Javascript, there are many many positive uses for Javascript, such as history.go(-1).
Flash pisses me off because it takes away functionality from my browser...
00101010
a good thing would be to mention cross-platform and browser compatibility. Don't use Microsoft's arbitrary closed extensions. Make sure that the page validates as W3C code, or at least almost does it.
But many other things in the article were bulls-eye, like the tiny text.
Ciryon
At least if we take the common design mistakes as the metric.
'Poor email intergration' sounds pretty sophisticated compared to 'don't use the <blink> tag'.
Lisp is the Tengwar of programming languages.
how about sites that think mozilla can't render something?
...especially when mozilla 1.3a gets blocked but netscape 6.2.2 doesn't!
nothing quite as annoying as
"you need Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6.2.2+ to view this site"
solution: some browsers allow you to change the userAgent.
in mozilla, the prefbar plugin allows this (among other things).
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Does anyone with a monster graphics card jacked up to max resolution use your site?
I like using large fonts on high resolution; it looks nice. Small fonts are too small to read on my monitor.
(I'm 31 and have better than 20/20 eyes.)
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
These days I find fewer and fewer public and commercial websites that are relying on framesets for layout and navigation. IMHO, this is a good thing. However, I have noticed that a large number of web-based interfaces for commercial, enterprise-oriented applications, as well as many internal enterprise websites/web-applications, tend to rely very heavily on framesets.
I would like to see Nielsen revisit his 1996 critique of frames, perhaps exploring some of the technologies (PHP, JSP, ASP etc.*) that have provided better solutions to the problems frames initially tried to correct (dynamic navigation/content, rich GUI interface, etc.).
* While dynamic, server-generated content was around in 1996 (cgi, ssi, and shtml), it was not as widespread, nor was it as readily available to the average web-designer/developer.
I do not run flash on my main browser. I do not like to upgrade browser software because it will generally include flash. I have seen good uses of flash. I have more often seen gratuitous uses that stifle the visitor.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Did you notice the alt tags on the Nielsen site? I've never seen another site put that much effort into a page.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My wife works for a not-to-be-named textbook company. Their online companion to one of their books was getting incredibly poor remarks. She was in a group working on the problem, so she asked to see the site map. The answer from the web-design group was "site map? We don't have one." So she clarified that she was talking about a design site map. They didn't have one of those, either.
I wonder how many sites with no site map actually don't even have a design map? I would venture quite a few. Web design is similar to software enginerring: without a good plan, you're gonna get crap out of the process.
URL > 75 Characters Long URLs break the Web's social navigation because they make it virtually impossible to email a friend a recommendation to visit a Web page. If the URL is too long to show in the browser's address field, many users won't know how to select it. If the URL breaks across multiple lines in the email, most recipients won't know how to glue the pieces back together. The result? No viral marketing, just because your URLs are too long. Bad way to lose business.
There are two side points to this:
- To shorten your addresses and make your URLs more durable to change, point your links to www.foobar.com, NOT to www.foobar.com/default.htm (or index.jsp, or whatever).
- Don't invoke sessions unless absolutely needed. Sometimes these are in the URL, sometimes they are cookies. It is irritating to copy a URL, mail it to someone, and find that they can't access it because it is relying on a session which expired (in the case of a URL) or a session which their computer doesn't have (in the case of a cookie).
One kludge to get around massively long URLs is to use a service like ShortURL. Neat idea. But definitely a hack.Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
Most of the points he made are valid. Unfortunatly Nielson dosn't hold much credibility within the design commmunity. Many, including myself believe that he thinks the web should be vanilla plain, devoid of any asthetic value. His website reflects this.
He is a usability expert NOT a design expert.
Its not that difficult to create a site that is pleasing to the eye and conforms to usability guidelines. If he paid a 1/4th as much attention to design as he does to usability more designers would pay attention to what he is saying.
So is this where I stick a witty comment?
On the other side are those practical people who realize that the above idealization is ludicrous. We do care what things look like. Our clients do need clean well designed pages. Our clients do not understand the utopia we are trying to create, and therefore want to do stupid things like have a smidgen more space between the paragraphs, and we can do little to stop them.
The issue should, at this point, be largely resolved. The font tag is depreciated and shouldn't be used. CSS is defined well enough to allow designers control the look of the page while allowing the rendering engine to override that look when necessary. Also, as much as we might complain, IE defines the look of the web, and most designers are crafted their page to the IE engine. Responsible designers make sure the code works well enough in other engines, but IE is the look and feel.
What that means is that what happens in IE is not broken behavior, it is default behavior. M$ should be more responsible, but often their mistakes become default behavior.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black