Top 10 design mistakes

Jakob Nielsen celebrates 10 years of usability fanaticism with a recap of his predilections and predictions, both right and wrong.

Despite dispensing more than 300,000 words of adice, Nielsen says his most read article, "Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design," still holds true. (Though he concedes that these mistakes occur with less frequency.)

Updated in 2004, here is Nielsen's list of the top 10 very worst Web design mistakes:

1. Bad Search.

2. PDF Files for Online Reading

3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links

4. Non-Scannable Text

5. Fixed Font Size

6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility

7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement

8. Violating Design Conventions

9. Opening New Browser Windows

10. Not Answering Users' Questions

I cringed when I got to No. 9, because I have stubbornly stuck to this design convention in my own site. Is your site guilty of any of these design gaffes? If so, how will you fix it?