I'm not sure if Adobe is in a position to be giving advice on web design, especially when they seem to ignore their own advice.

One of their Don'ts is to avoid generic photos of people, yet the same post has a generic photo of a guy using a computer. That adds absolutely no value and just makes for a heavier payload. Not every blog post needs to have a big stupid header image. Stop pulling that manipulative crap.

"Don’t show automatic pop-ups too early" should be "Don’t show automatic pop-ups". They're always annoying. If you want to get users to sign up to your newsletter or whatever, you can just provide a link at the end. This is something that this blog got right.

"Don’t use too many typefaces" should be "Don't use custom typefaces". Your website is not special. There's certainly exceptions to this, but in general I'd say it's better to completely avoid custom typefaces. This also has the added benefit of allowing your site to load faster.

Not gonna go over each individual point. But one extra criticism of the blog itself: holy crap, why is there this stupid fixation of having a huge fixed header that scrolls along with you? That header is gigantic and serves no purpose, as I can scroll to the top just fine.

Another point: your blog has absolutely terrible accessibility. I can't navigate it with my keyboard. You specifically removed outlines on focused links, effectively killing keyboard navigation. This is literally prioritizing the designer's fantasies over the user's needs.

> 5. Don’t show automatic pop-ups too early

How about don't show automatic pop-ups at all?

These things have become a plague on the modern web. I'm so fucking sick of every single website pestering me to sign up for their newsletter. No, I don't want your newsletter. I want to read your article and move on. I'm probably never coming back to your site anyway. And no, I'm not turning off adblock either. So blocking me from entering your site because I'm running an adblocker means I will most certainly never whitelist your site, I will leave and never come back, and no matter what your content is, you're never getting ad revenue from me.

TL;DR: Stop with the pop-ups. Period.

> Don’t show automatic pop-ups too early

Imo, showing popups at all is a design sin. It wasn't cool in the 90s when it happened with separate browser windows, and it isn't cool now embedded in your page.

It's actually worse now because there's no easy way to block them!

NoScript does wonders. Some might say this isn't easy, as it will break some sites, but in my experience you can get pretty far with it.

13/ make sure your webpage doesn't depend on Javascript just to display an article and its title, like 99% of news websites and blogs today...

14/ avoid sticky headers,like this page has, that take 1/8 of the screen real estate on a laptop and even worse on mobile.

15/ A reader should be able to increase/decrease the size of the text without destroying your layout.

16/ Stick to simple "websafe" fonts for the body of your articles. Some fancy fonts that look good on your MAC look really bad on Windows.

17/ the most horrible thing designers do: light text on white background. Please stop. Just because it looks good on your calibrated $2000 screen doesn't mean it will on a $250 laptop with limited contrast settings.

14a/ avoid sticky footers too, like that page has

Well, there's some nice advice here. Okay, it's not exactly revolutionary, and most web designers should probably be aware of everything on the list already, but in a world where certain bad design ideas seem to be making a comeback, it's a nice refresher none the less.

This is pretty good stuff. My wife is an Art Professor who's trying to learn basic web-design so she is eligible to teach it to Art students. The schools mostly use Dream Weaver and Muse (both from Adobe) and to be honest I think its a good idea (Though I've convinced her that the first few weeks they should go through codecademy's HTML lessons so they at least have an idea about how HTML and CSS works).

I feel like web design is mostly a solved problem. These do's and don'ts highlight the fact that we know what the heck a web site should do, and there's so much crappy experiments to try and make it more that what it is.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for innovation, but sometimes I enjoy turning javaScript off and seeing how much easier life is by being able to just read the text without being assaulted by shitty attention grabbing cruft. If you're a web dev, I suggest you spend an afternoon each week turning off JS and seeing what it's like.

The creators of Flash have some nerve running that article :-)

FutureWave and Macromedia created Flash

How about 'dont ask for permissions to send push notifications to my browser' for everyone who gets to your page? or 'Dont overlay fixed ads on the screen'.

It used to be that I only had to clear one popup, now every news site its ok, I do want to continue my life in agony without your newsletter, close this ad overlay so I can see the content, no don't want you pushing notifications to my browser". Skip!

Can I disable that little popup in Chrome asking if I want to allow it?

Is u/babich a bot? I don't understand the possible purpose of posting so many low quality articles about design that usually don't generate any discussion.

The author of the article is named Nick Babich - looking at his past submissions, it looks like he's just sharing his own articles here

...from the people who brought you Flash. And continue to bring you Dreamweaver. And so so many other web atrocities.

1) don't use flash 2) don't use coldfusion 3) don't ????

At least the page is designed reasonably so the reader view can strip all their crap and show just the story.