This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Jakob the usability guy on blogs
I have mixed feelings about Jakob Nielsen. His book got me excited about designing for user experience years ago, and I enjoy his rigor. But something about his tone sets me on edge, and his website is just so ugly, it's hard to use.
So he published a little piece on "The Top Ten Design Mistakes in Weblogs" today, and I have to say I agreed with him up and down the list. This weblog you are reading has made several of the mistakes, my pitiable 'about me' and lack of photo, for example. I often check for an about page when I first read a new blog, so I should know better.
Many of the usability issues of my weblog stem from my drive to simplicity which led me to publish a weblog in my AFS account, which could be maintained with the absolute minimum of maintenance. Here's the process of writing a blog entry for me. Write a blog entry in BBedit and save it. That's it, a little script updates my blog for me every 30 minutes. But publishing to AFS means the site is a set of static files, and I've foregone categories and individual post pages (you just get monthly archives). Sadly those monthly archive pages are so long, Google doesn't index the whole page, so they aren't even very searchable.
So, I've been a little chagrined to find myself embarrassed by Jakob, a guy who's website looks like it by a elementary school student. Honestly, I barely think about my weblog as a website, it's mostly an RS feed to me. But I may just spiff the place up a bit, here and there, for those readers who come here the old fashioned way.
Tags: usability weblog JakobNielsen