The ten mistakes of web design in 2002, reviewed in 2010

In 2002, Jakob nielsen published a now classic article on the ten mistakes that are usually made when designing web pages... and on the blog of www.cookingideas.es They analyze the current state of the matter.

1. Do not put prices in stores or sales, promotion or e-commerce pages. In this aspect things have improved a lot and online stores have learned a lot. Prices are a fundamental part of commercial websites, often due to legal obligation, especially in sites such as travel agencies, where all concepts must be detailed in detail. Some websites even allow you to sort the results of a table or search based on price or other characteristics, with a single click. However… one sin that many stores continue to fall into is not offering an individual “product page” with a short URL (web address) that is easy to copy and paste/forward to other people.
2. Use inflexible or completely inflexible search engines. This seems to continue to be the curse of the web. The "internal search engines" remain poor and incomplete, imprecise and inflexible. Sometimes it would seem that not even the owners of a website do tests by looking for their own content to see how things work. And many are as slow as they are useless. This problem especially affects newspapers and online stores that store vast content. A possible solution in this Google-dominated world is to use Google Site Search to search Google style – with its algorithms and search options – within the content of your own website. The only problem is guaranteeing the "freshness" of the results, but in this aspect Google has improved a lot and behaves almost in "real time."
3. The "scroll" or horizontal movement of the page. Luckily these types of designs have been abandoned except for purely experimental or artistic issues. With larger and higher resolution monitors, almost any web design fits “without horizontal scroll” in today's windows, but both designers and users prefer the vertical version.
4. Fixed size fonts. With design techniques becoming more flexible and the advent of alternative browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, web designers realized that web page texts needed to be flexible. For everything else, keyboard shortcuts like Increase Font o Decrease font They allow you to "fix" any page quickly. (Ctrl + Plus/Minus on Windows; Command + Plus/Minus on Mac).
5. Jet text. Current designs allow for more options, but many inexperienced users still write overly long paragraphs, ignore bowling lists or numbered lists, and continue to create content that is difficult to read.
6. Use javascripts in the links. This technique is seen less and less, probably because there are other alternatives (especially advanced CSS and HTML) to create visual effects and because SEO (search engine optimization) techniques recommend avoiding them, to make things easier for Google when reading a Web. With the advent of "tabs" in browsers, people have also learned that if they want to open a link in a new window or tab they can do so with a simple click (Ctrl + click on the link in Windows; Command + click on Mac).
7. Frequently asked questions (FAQ) documents that include more (or less) than they should contain. The old bad habits seem not to be lost, and the current FAQs, when they exist, usually contain the questions that the owners of the website would like what they did to them, not what the users really make.
8. Ask for the user's email address without showing the confidentiality policy. This is definitely over: nowadays and for legal reasons it is mandatory, at least in Spain, to show the text related to privacy and data protection before asking for an email address or any other relevant personal data. Furthermore, it is also regulated and not supported «mark by default» boxes to give permission to use said data.
9. Web addresses (URL) greater than 75 characters.
10. The seemingly arbitrary length of 75 characters refers to the fact that originally emails cut paragraphs into lines of 75 to 80 characters, more or less, before sending them, and if a URL was cut off it was a hassle to paste the whole thing back in. . Nowadays the length of a link practically does not matter, but short ones are preferable, for example to send them to a mobile device. However, with this solution came a worse plague: address shorteners like TinyURL, Bit.ly and similar. What was once an endless stream of strange numbers and signs are now very short URLs with a short code of letters and numbers. The problem: the link structure of the Web is slightly damaged, and perhaps those shortening services will not live forever, "breaking" the Web. Such is the situation that initiatives such as 301works.org to try to alleviate greater problems in the future.
11. Place links to email addresses in unexpected places. Spam put an end to this problem: now practically no one risks showing an email address on a web page, whether visible or hidden, as it will easily be captured by hackers. spammers. Instead, forms are usually used.