#1 for me: anchor text containing the word 'here'. Bonus points for 'click here'
Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
11–20 of 56 posts
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#12Not mentioned: using a large font size so each line contains only five words. For example, webpagesthatsuck.com does this.
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#13Some reasonable points here but overall it feels like I'm reading tips (with examples) from 2005. The final point about JS made me cringe... "My home page goes from 31,803 bytes to 71,488 because of the JavaScript I've added to track visitors to my page and what they do. " Using bytes to make it sound extreme is just silly. 70KB is hardly relevant today.
> 70KB is hardly relevant today.
That mentality got us into this mess in the first place.
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#14"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly." I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar. I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out ac…
This made me think of Wikipedia. Some of their topics have incredibly long pages. It's clearly very poor advice as a blanket statement. Wikipedia would be a much worse site if they made you navigate page-to-page for each section about a topic.
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#15"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly." I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar. I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out ac…
I personally hate such design - what's the point of having a 24" monitor when the web page looks like it's optimized for mobile/tablet anyway?
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#16Those screen captures of embedded Youtube videos are a "bait-and-switch" usability issue IMO.
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#17I think this particular site (Hacker News) is really bad when considering contrast. Just look at this comment after a while.
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#18"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly." I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar. I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out ac…
It's not a clear-cut to me. The scrollable design has its own usability problems if you look closer at the Docker page: multiple access paths, content spread, and more often than not people just don't notice there's a scrollbar (with 16:9 they are so tiny that a distracted visitor may not notice it). You can tell that the designer of the Docker page had this problem because you see three times "What is docker?" on that page, two of them being actual links.
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#19I think this particular site (Hacker News) is really bad when considering contrast. Just look at this comment after a while.
Are you assuming that it's going to get downvoted so much that it becomes illegible?
Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
#20I think #2 should be #1, it is insane on how many people can not articulate what their website is about in a sentence or two. It becomes so frustrating for a brand new user to visit a website and reads a bunch of marketing gibberish.
Sometimes I think that a good test would be to have a 7 year old come to home page of the website. Let him look around and then report back to you what the website is about. :)