Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design

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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox writes about top ten mistakes in web design. He's been doing it for ten years.

When you're in a business that serves people, and the "top ten mistakes" are all about technical features, you must wonder if you're making an even bigger mistake in how you think about making sites.

The color of visited links? PDF files for online reading?? These are honestly the top ten mistakes of web design? I certainly don't know what the top ten errors really are, but I've rewritten some of the Alertbox ones to give you an idea:

• Have Simple pages. De-clutter is good for brains. Web design - including questions about ads, text size, and conventions -- are all about rocketing a page into the user's brain in a pleasant, instantaneous fashion. It's about how the site interacts with normal, human brains.
  
• Have a Simple message. As Ogilvy says, Advertising should be written in sentences of no more than twelve words. What does your site do? We remember short messages. Long messages are usually lost or mangled.
  
• Don't have Random Features. Do you need a search box on your site? Does it return good results? Does searching help the customer or frustrate the customer? Don't have a search box if it's not actually helpful - even if it's supplied by Google and hence requires almost no effort.
  
• Don't have Random Navigation. This clutters your site and your message. I think MySpace is fun, but I can't find anything on it, despite a profusion of navigation menus.
  
• Don't have Broken Features. Do less, better. The original Google philosophy, and possibly still the current one. When you expand, you must know what is key. Address book import does not work for me on MySpace. For MySpace, that is a pretty key feature. If it worked for me, I might have three times as many friends - multiply that by a few million people and you have the cost of that feature not working right.
  

That said, I found the list useful for a couple of reminders, like changing the color of visited links. I have been debating pop-up windows for a while. Personally, sometimes I hate pop-up windows, and sometimes I prefer them. I think most people hate them most of the time, but I have seen them successful on some sites and see them serving a function on Linkspank. The jury will decide. The main reason I think that pop-ups may go is that people have tried it and received negative feedback, so it's scarce on popular sites. Forgetting the jury itself is one of the top ten mistakes on the web. :-)

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Merry Spankmas

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The Spankmas Elves are still working on the New Linkspank, featuring the Secret Weapon Under Development. Hopefully it will be done by the 12th day of Christmas, which is January 6th.

In the meantime, you can always check out Santa Links on Linkspank, such as this picture.



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Chicago Beta

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This week I checked out Chicago Beta, a networking group which had its third meetup on December 12th.

It was pretty cool. I went around and described the Linkspank concept as "MySpace meets Digg," and made some vague allusions to the Secret Weapon Under Development.

There were web developers there and it was cool to meet people who were ready, willing & able to get involved with a startup, unlike all those business school students who TALK about their PASSION for startups and then go work for non-startups. :-)

Rags showed up and we chatted a while with some interesting folks, including Eric from Feedburner. I've always been interested in Feedburner, the supreme king of RSS feeds. One topic of our discussion is how small a percentage of the population knows what feeds are, how it's a pain in the ass to add them to readers and pages mostly, how IE7 may speed adoption.

The event could have used more people and more logistics but it's totally cool that such a thing is going on. Next month is another bigger event, TechCocktail -- note URL on that link :-) -- and Linkspank will potentially demo there and unleash the Secret Weapon Under Development.

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So 1996 (The Truth Can Hurt)

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I think from now on a litmus test for titling our blog posts should be, "Does this sound like a good song title?"

But I digress, without even having yet begun. Referring to the layout, Linkspank advisor Rags made the comment the other day that Linkspank was "1996."

Ouch. Painful because it's true!

The next prototype of the site, which will also contain the Secret Weapon Under Development, will hopefully be more like 1998.

How will this two year spring into the less remote past happen? A couple strategies:
1. finally caving in and doing rounded boxes like all the other "web 2.0"
2. orange
3. not having so squinchy a site.

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The Quest for Simplicity

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Every company should be able to summarize what it does and what makes it different in one sentence, regardless of whether it chooses to share this statement with customers or competitors.

Linkspank is still in the 2-3 sentence range. A strategy of 2-3 sentences is the same as one of 100 sentences, which is the same as one of 0 sentences: worthless. So I'm working on getting us to the one sentence.

The interesting thing is that we are a one-sentence business. Where did we go wrong? Our prototype website, as an attempt to start "simple", left out what I'm starting to think is the central idea to the site, and our best shot at getting to one sentence that makes sense.

So soon I hope to add in that new central piece, make the technology of the site slightly more complicated, and the idea a little simpler.

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Economist digs Digg

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In the Nov 30 issue The Economist highlighted Digg as part of its Technology Quarterly. They do a good job of summarizing Digg:

Digg.com, the most famous example of the genre, allows users to submit
interesting new items from around the web, relating to politics, technology,
celebrity trivia or anything else. Other users say whether they find the
stories interesting by "Digging", or clicking on them. The most frequently
"Dugg" stories appear on the front page.

Then they go on to talk about how "social news" on the rise.

Some observations:

1. This is the space Linkspank is moving into. It's about using people, not traditional search, to find things.
   
2. Note that neither Digg nor any of the other sites out there currently are social networking sites. Rather than social networking, they use the "wisdom of crowds" to pick winning articles.
   

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