Criticism for Christmas

Long-time-renowned usability expert Jakob Nielsen once again puts on his Scrooge hat at Christmas and tells the web community what they’re doing wrong in his “Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003.” Actually, I’m grateful that he does this; it’s a wonderful service to online publishers. It’s sort of like finding a bottle of vitamins in your holiday stocking. What’s shocking is that much of what Nielsen finds wrong this year has been so obviously wrong for so long. For instance, he chides websites that when they archive content create new URLs, which causes “linkrot” on the old URLs. How sad that this problem is still around on many sites. The same goes for undated content — a sin that news sites in particular should never commit. Of course, Nielsen is looking at all sites for his critique, not just media websites. I urge you to take a look at Nielsen’s list and see if there’s anything here that needs fixing on your site.