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

Javascript in links and Flash animation

[phylus]

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).

Re:Javascript in links and Flash animation

[Reziac]

But your links that require js lock out everyone who has js turned off -- acto WebTechniques magazine (now NewArchitect), that's some 30% of users and growing -- including folks behind corp firewalls that strip js, so the user has no choice. At the very least, be kind enough to give us plain links somewhere on the same page!!

Tho the absolute most obnoxious links arrived shortly after DreamweaverMX -- where the entire menu is done as flash buttons. The way they're rigged, you can't even download the .swf and extract the URL by hand, plus there's nothing useful in docsource.

Re:Javascript in links and Flash animation

[Just Some Guy]

What's wrong with saying "Click here to go back" instead of saying "Go find the back button which isn't near what you're reading right now and click that."
What's wrong with doing something like:

Click <a href="<? echo $HTTP_REFERER ?>">here</a> to go back

The above example is PHP, but applies equally well to whatever server-side scripting language you're using. Why force your users to enable JavaScript when there's no real need for it?

Good stuff but...

[ciryon]

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

Web designers competence improves?

[varjag]

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'.

browser type

[Khopesh]

how about sites that think mozilla can't render something?
nothing quite as annoying as
"you need Internet Explorer 5+ or Netscape 6.2.2+ to view this site"
...especially when mozilla 1.3a gets blocked but netscape 6.2.2 doesn't!

solution: some browsers allow you to change the userAgent.
in mozilla, the prefbar plugin allows this (among other things).

Re:Fixed text size? Only because M$ broke it

[battjt]

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

All Good, but, but, but

[Greyfox]

It seems like most web sites feel like they have to annoy you with their obnoxious design. Corporate internal web sites often seem to be the worst offenders, too. It seems like the last thing a company is going to do is spend a few bucks for a usability person to go over the design of the web pages with them.

Did you notice the alt tags on the Nielsen site? I've never seen another site put that much effort into a page.

Re:They missed websites that are just unnavigable

[parc]

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.

Looooooong URLs

[FTL]

From the (slashdotted) article:
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:

1. 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).
2. 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.