Top 10 mistakes in web page design

[thewayne]

I need to review my sites. I know I don't make most of these, still, it never hurts to check.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html

Comments

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

Interesting. The PDF comment is a bit odd, as at least with Firefox, it has integrated PDF ability. Granted, I dislike PDF's on websites too, but sometimes it's the only way to get something out there like a newsletter or whatnot.

some of the things on the list made me think that the author of the article assumes everyone to be complete idiots when it comes to their computer.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

PDFs and Word docs on web sites really piss me off because most of the time they are not done well. First, I think they should include a (PDF) after a link because a lot of the time I don't want to open a PDF if I don't absolutely have to, I don't like the add'l system resources that it requires. And then there's the matter that Acrobat leaves a memory stub "to increase performance" for the next time you open a PDF.

Guess what? If you're tight on memory, as my laptop is, that performance increase for PDFs slows down everything else!

I particularly hate job applications where they use Word docs or PDFs to give you a pretty app, then they don't properly format the document and you can't fill in the blanks.

These are particular gripes of mine. I fully appreciate that there are times when PDFs are the way to go, but a lot of time they could be done as HTML and it would actually take less space on the server because you don't have the overhead that the PDF file structure requires. Most documents on the web don't require ultra-precise formatting, and that is what PDFs give you with platform-independence.

As far as Firefox's native ability to read PDFs, I'm unaware of that. I'm running 2.0 on both my desktop and laptop, and they open the full Acrobat reader whenever I open a PDF through the browser.

[annaonthemoon.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about job aps as PDFs, I spent a good hour one time trying to get it so i could WRITE on the damn thing. Very frustrating. I agree that if you need to put a pdf, you should note that it IS a pdf before someone blindly clicks.

I used to have memory issues too, then my laptop went boom and i got a dual core, so well, it's not really fair of me to complain about system resources anymore.

[silveradept]

All of these are good pieces of advice. I've also seen pages that violate at least one, if not more, of those conventions. They're quite the frustrating type.

[thedragonweaver.livejournal.com]

The one about type size is telling. Back In the Day I used to render font as +1 for the very reason that I knew I had older readers— and though I'm not in the least inconvenienced by the visual equivalent of 9-point type, it pisses me off.