Jakob Nielsen = God

I very much rely on the writing of Jakob Nielsen in my job as a web writer. He has a lot of great tips about how people read text on the web (they scan pages) and how to write so they get needed information (bulleted lists instead of large blocks of text). These articles about design usability are also excellent. We use breadcrumbs on our website at work and I find them very helpful because they show exactly where you are in the architecture of a website and you can jump up to higher levels very easily.

The article about links was good because it brought up things I'd never even thought of when designing for the web -- such as using underlines if your link colors are red or green so color-blind people can see them. Genius!

And, of course, top ten lists are always great. I admit guilt on several of these -- namely, opening pages in new windows (I thought that was good!), not changing the color for visited links and fixed font sizes. I will be mindful of integrating these usability standards into my designs from now on. And a pet peeve: I hate when links open PDFs and there is no warning. At work we have a little PDF logo that automatically appears next to links to PDFs so you know what you're getting yourself into. But I still try to minimize the practice of linking to PDFs because they are not at all user-friendly. Yuck.