I’ve decided to start cataloguing what I’m going to call “egregious design errors.” There’s so much bad design out there, and it will at the very least make me feel better to call it out. Most of it will be on the Web, but as Becky will tell you, nothing can stop me from critiquing household appliances, architecture, pens, etc.
Here’s a typically moronic example: Restaurants that post their menus online as PDFs. There are all sorts of problems here. PDF files are large (one to two megabytes per page, in some cases) and require plugins. Of course, there are plenty of good reasons to use PDFs, but this isn’t one of them. Precise layout isn’t critical. The Web is not a printed publication (in some cases, it might be nice to offer a PDF if you think for some reason that people want to print out copies for around the office - but this will never happen if you make the Web page look good). The linked example even goes out of its way to be worse: it links to individual pages of the menu! So to view the whole menu, I need to download at least five megabytes and click five links. So let’s just “do it up” in HTML and use a few kilobyes of bandwidth, on both ends.
P.S. - Bonus points awarded to the reader who can find at least two types of irony in this post.