Not all sites follow best practices to the letter, but as a usability guy here are some of the peccadillos or minor annoyances I always encounter on the Web:
Down with the Times New Roman empire!
Who the hell uses Time New Roman anymore? Not for Web sites, anyway. Ol’ TNR serif may be popular with the digitally challenged who don’t know how to change the default font on their Microsoft Word, but it’s such a dated, hokey-looking font that it doesn’t belong anywhere on the Web. There’s a guy who publishes a site called Ban Comic Sans, but I hate TNR even more than I hate Comic Sans.
The Page Title tag is for, um, a page title.
How many professionally designed sites do I still see with a meaningless page title such as “default” or even something embarrassing like “insert title here.” Uh, last count was 5, 186, 327. Search engines like page titles. And when people bookmark sites, they like to see something in their Favorites other than “default” or “homepage.”
Stop using splash pages.
You heard me. Stop it. Stop it right now! Splash pages were indeed invented by a man named A. Bored Webdesigner in the 1990s so that Web designers could slap an attractive-looking graphic at the front end of the site. You know, that place where everyone is looking for information, links, functionality, etc. Not that users don’t want to
- Stare at a pre-load animation that says “Page Loading!” for 15 seconds for their lives;
- Gaze in admiration as your Flash splash rolls out its animated images and other bragware about your company for 2 minutes, and
- Find the tiny link that says “Click here to go to homepage” when they thought they already were going to the homepage, and now have to click one more time to get where they wanted to go to begin with.
Some splash pages offer a helpful link that says “skip”, which should actually say “click here to skip this self-indulgent crap that you didn’t want to see in the first place and make that extra effort to visit our site even though we are trying to frustrate your attempts to do so.”
Rant over and out.
(more to come!)