Some of you may know who Jakob Nielsen is. He's a design expert (I'm not sure what his credentials actually are) who has been righteously ragging on web design issues for a long time. How long? Well, take a look back on his 1996 Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. It's actually a good (and silly) read.
About a month ago (OK, almost exactly a month ago) he authored Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes which seems to address some of the biggest problems in quasi-professional weblog design.
Of course, I think a lot of the notes that he gives presumes that you're already past the, "my life is terrible, behold my angst" level of posting and that you've got at least a bit of interesting content to post. But once you're at that point, his tips are really appropriate.
I'm negligent on a few different points, and I plan on addressing them soon:
- 1: No author biography
- 2: No author photograph
- 8: Mixing topics
- 9: Forgetting that you write for your future boss (admittedly, only rarely)
The plan is to get around to fixing these soon, but I'm not sure if it'll happen before The Great Server Migration of 2005.
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