I’m sur­prised that Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Design Mis­takes for Web Logs hasn’t stirred much com­ment in blog cir­cles I fre­quent. Maybe I fre­quent the wrong circles!

Most of the mis­takes are pretty obvi­ous and not very con­tentious. Most of them apply more to busi­ness blogs than per­sonal sites. I do dis­agree with a cou­ple though…

1. No Author Biographies

I’ll pay that. I don’t like to go to a blog and have no idea about the author. I came across this a cou­ple of times in the post­ing frenzy after Web Essen­tials 05. These peo­ple went to the same con­fer­ence as I did, so we obvi­ously share many of the same ideas and pas­sions — but who are they, and where are they from? Did I pos­si­bly meet some of them? Enquir­ing minds want to know!

So am I guilty of sin num­ber one? Almost. My About me page is piti­fully short but at least it has my real name on it. And if you fol­low one of the “mul­ti­ple per­sona dis­or­der” links to my other sites you’ll find some more gen­eral info. As with every­thing else I will even­tu­ally get around to flesh­ing out that page. But with words, ok — I don’t intend to rec­tify Design Mis­take Num­ber Two…

2. No Author Photo

You don’t need to see me. There’s enough bloody pho­tos of me plas­tered all over the inter­net — can you tell I pre­fer being behind the cam­era? But with other people’s blogs as well — it doesn’t con­cern me if I don’t know what they look like. I’ll base my opin­ions on their words instead.

Mr Nielsen, on the other hand…

No, I don’t want to pay out on Jakob. That’s quite fash­ion­able. One of our pro­gram­mers, Dominic, has actu­ally seen him speak and said it was really inspir­ing. I believe Dom — it’s just that Jakob’s not always right, and he comes across as a bit of a dweeb.

3. Non­de­script Post­ing Titles

While I agree that many blog post titles could be more descrip­tive, I don’t nec­es­sar­ily think they should read like news­pa­per head­lines. If your post title is intrigu­ing, I’ll click on it. Of course, the Search Engine Opti­mist in me likes key­words in titles — I can’t help it. That can back­fire, how­ever — over on my Cold­Fu­sion blog, when it was more of a per­sonal site and I was rab­bit­ing on about what­ever I felt like at the time, I made a post about the Rock It music fes­ti­val — and it ended up rank­ing in Google above the offi­cial site. That was nice — except that I was flooded with com­ments from the sub-15 year old rock kid set. I tol­er­ated it for a while until the LOL LOL Billy Joe is a HOTTTTEEEEE LOL com­ments and cor­re­spond­ing abuse ticked me off and I deleted most of them (look­ing up the title for this post, I see some of them are back). That was largely the impe­tus for me to split my ram­blings up into topic cen­tric sites — this one for web stan­dards, my orig­i­nal domain name for ColdFusion-related top­ics, and a “com­ing real soon now” site for my musi­cal rants and raves.

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go

Fair call. I try to describe links, but I don’t gen­er­ally use the link titles, mostly because I lazy (and also I didn’t go to the Web Essen­tials ses­sion on the title attribute, but it didn’t seem too com­pli­men­tary). I would like to imple­ment those funky JavaScript pop up ‘nice titles’ when I get time — I think they’re very styl­ish. That would prob­a­bly encour­age me to use the title attribute more reli­giously. For a while anyway.

5. Clas­sic Hits Are Buried

Again, guilty as charged. This blog hasn’t been around long enough to have any “clas­sic hits”. But we’ll see over time. Word­Press makes things like that so easy — any fea­ture I think of, some­one has already imple­mented as a plugin.

6. The Cal­en­dar Is The Only Navigation

Yeah, that would suck. Can’t think the last time I saw that, though. I wrote a blog post about blog cal­en­dars a long time ago because I was con­cerned that I didn’t have one at all — but the com­ments I got seemed to indi­cate that no one used them any­way. Meh.

7. Irreg­u­lar Pub­lish­ing Frequency

This I don’t agree with. In these aggre­gated days, I’d rather read your well-considered, thought out posts on what­ever sched­ule you’d pre­fer — I’ll see your posts any­way and my feed reader won’t mind that you don’t post every sin­gle day/week/whatever. I’m very erratic — I’ll post every day for ages and then noth­ing for a month. I don’t want to pub­lish dri­vel — I’ll only post when I have some­thing to say.

8. Mix­ing Topics

This is impor­tant. I don’t mind the occa­sional per­sonal post on a tech­ni­cal blog — I like to feel like I know my favourite blog­gers just a lit­tle bit. But it can go too far — I made this mis­take myself on my first incar­na­tion of Kay Lives Here, lead­ing to the birth of this blog. The prob­lem is that I’m too inter­ested in too many diverse topics.

9. For­get­ting You Write For Your Future Boss

Big one. I’m fairly care­ful — but we had a job appli­ca­tion a cou­ple of years ago from a per­son who listed their own per­sonal weblog as a port­fo­lio piece. Blogs back then were still some­what of a nov­elty, so we all had a look. This person’s site had a neat side bar which listed their per­son­al­ity traits — includ­ing overly emo­tional, dif­fi­cult to get along with, and sulky. Need­less to say this per­son didn’t get the job.

10. Hav­ing a domain name owned by a Weblog Service

Have to agree with this one. I’m proud of my smoljak.com domain name — so proud in fact that I snaf­fled smoljak.org and smoljak.net as well. Zom­biecoder was a brain­wave from (Hal­loween baby) Dave — an idea for a cool net­work of sites from our like-minded friends. So far I’m the only one to have any­thing actu­ally live on their sub-domain! I have sev­eral other cool domain names as well — with Godaddy being so cheap some­times we have ideas, find the domain name is avail­able, and can’t help our­selves. Most of them never end up going anywhere.

How­ever, I do have a brand-spanking new WordPress.com blog. I just couldn’t resist, Word­Press is such a cool piece of code. Unlike other hosted ser­vices though, I can’t help think­ing that WordPress.com will keep some of it’s cool fac­tor, so I don’t mind.