Alertbox - Top Ten Good Deeds in Web Design

In his Alertbox article of 3 October 1999, Doctor Jakob Nielson changed his common venue of pointing out mistakes to instead pointing out the top ten good deeds that designers can do to improve usability on their sites.

Your name and logo should be on every page of the site. With the exception of on the home page, the logo should also be a link to the home page.
In order to provide easy browsing in sites with over a hundred pages, it’s a must to have a search bar.
Make your page titles and headlines straightforward so that search engines will be able to easily identify them and make sense when taken out-of context and put into the results listing.
Have the text on your page organized so that it’s easily scannable and the user can get the gist of it very easily. This can be facilitated by breaking down long paragraphs and the like using groupings with subheadings.
Don’t cram everything into a single page. Make one page that has an overview with links to other pages that each focus on an individual topic.
Use thumbnails in the cases of photographs on product pages and the like. This way, the primary page will load quickly. To get bigger images, users can click on the thumbnail, which leads to a separate page with the entirety of the picture.
Use image reduction before making those thumbnails; get rid of all the unnecessary parts of the picture through cropping.
Provide users with a clue as to where a link will take them through the use of link titles.
Make all your main pages accessible to disabled users who will use things like screen readers.
Follow how the big websites design their pages, since users will expect your site to work that way.

I’ve followed most of the guidelines in this Alertbox, but some of them, such as numbers eight and nine, I hadn’t considered before. From now on, I’ll be making an effort to do so.