Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design Summary
Jakob Nielsen’s article, “Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design” is one meant to summerize the extensive web design mistakes he has observed over the past few years. Many of the mistakes listed in this article are the same as were listed in the web design mistakes of 2005 article that I already read and summarized so I think I will just list the mistakes and then talk about the differences between these two articles.
Mistake 1 was bad search, 2 was extensive use of PDF files, 3 was not changing the color of visited links, 4 was poorly used text, 5 was fixed font size. Six was page titles unsuitable for search engine scanning, 7 was anything that looks like an advertisment, 8 was violating design conventions, 9 was opening new browser windows, and the final mistake was not answering the users quesitons.
Several things stood out to me as information I couldn't get from the other article I read. The first was methods of making a page's text appropriate for the web. These techniques include, using subheads, bulleted lists, highlighted keywords, short paragraphs, the inverted pyramid, simple writing styles and "de-fluffed language." These things help people scan only the text the they determine to be most important to them. I also thought the infomation about making page titles scannable for information very interesting.
I plan on implementing the information I gleaned here in my own web designs by making my web copy scannable, using the techneiques provided in this article. I also plan to pay closer attention to my web titles, in order to make sure they define important ideas that search engines might latch onto.
To read this article visit alertbox.
March 31, 2008 12:05 PM