Chaos Magnet

Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003

I've become less enamored of Jakob Nielsen ever since the unique address I gave him to subscribe to his column wound up somehow on a spammer's list, but his Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 is still useful.

Interestingly, most of this year's mistakes aren't really obvious.

Many of this year's top design mistakes actually indicate a happy phenomenon: we are making progress in Web usability. Now that sites are doing certain things correctly, we get hit by second-order phenomena that only cause problems because users have progressed past the first-order issues.

For example, the question of good or bad ALT text only arises for sites that care enough about accessibility to have any ALT text.