The occasional scrivener

How this site fares in Nielsen’s weblog usability criteria

Jakob Nielsen has a list of top 10 design mistakes by weblogs. Here’s how I stack up.

1,2 No author bio and pics

Well, I have nice (updated!) pic on my About page. The bio could be more extensive, but hey, who reads that stuff anyway?

3 Nondescript posting titles

Could get better there, I suppose.

4 Links don’t say where they go

Also something I could do better, but I have been aware of it.

5 Classic hits are buried

Hmm, nice idea. I need to find the classics though.

6 The calender is the only navigation

I have both date based and category based archives.

7 Irregular publishing frequency

Huh? First, this is not my job, second, get an aggregator and stop surfin’ like it’s 1999, Jakob.

8 Mixing topics

As before, this is my site, I post what I want to.

9 Forgetting that you write for your future boss

Always worth thinking about. I feel that the skeletons in my digital wardrobe are pretty few, but I haven’t really done a full scan Google on myself.

10 Having a domain name owned by a weblog service

No probs there, unless the guys behind AllAboutSymbian kick me out.

Conclusion

For what it’s worth, I think Nielsen is a bit of an ass sometimes. But most of the above stuff makes sense.

Update: removed the butt-ugly <h4> tags.

Updated on Tuesday, 2005-10-18. Posted at 23:17, in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
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