Bad web design, 2005

Jakob Nielsen has published his list of the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005.

On the whole I agree with him, especially on the subject of fixed font sizes and frozen layouts. Not that it's going to do any good, of course.

Big deal

(NOT!)

For anyone who blinked and missed it, here's the substantive part of this morning's big Sun / Google announcement -- you know, the one that's been hyped in the geek press for the last week, and was going to have Microsoft trembling with fear, and turn your browser into a Microsoft Office clone with Google as the fileserver, and all that:

Under the agreement, Sun will include the Google Toolbar as an option in its consumer downloads of the Java Runtime Environment on http://java.com . In addition, the companies have agreed to explore opportunities to promote and enhance Sun technologies, like the Java Runtime Environment and the OpenOffice.org productivity suite available at http://www.openoffice.org .

That's it. You can see the full press release here. Meanwhile, would somebody please tell me what the big pre-announcement hype was about? Inquiring minds want to know.

added 12:05 Some people seem to think that the really important thing is that Google will be promoting OpenOffice. That would be good, of course, but it's still not clear why it would be worth making a big fuss about. Others have speculated that something must have gone wrong with the deal at the last minute, so the parties rolled out their fallback announcement.

How bad can a website get?

At least this bad (from theferrett)

Please bear in mind that this is not a joke -- this monstrosity belongs to some poor slob who's actually trying to sell a service! Right.