* Many potentially excellent and or useful Web applications fail to live up to their full potential
I think the world of Web applications is enormous. It includes everything from Web servers and browsers through client-side and server-side code to applications that use protocols associated with the Web. And on top of that foundation there’s the issue of process management, security, user interface design … all of the techniques and technologies that make Web applications actually work. This vast universe has created some great Web applications (Google, Google Maps, and eBay are obvious top-tier examples) and tens of thousands of really cool, clever, and creative products.
But there are also many potentially excellent and or useful Web applications that fail to live up to their full potential because their authors ignore certain rules and fundamentals. Today I have three Web application malpractices for you:
This first one is one of my biggest peeves. It concerns Web sites and services that have lots of content that is undated. It amazes me how many times I find an article that refers, for example, to “last week” but has no date attached to tell me when that week was. This is a serious problem because such content might appear to be important to some line of research but the lack of a date means it is either rejected because its relevance can’t be established or the researcher has to expend a lot of effort to pinpoint its date.
Another Web application malpractice that is particularly dumb is trying to drive traffic through bulk mail-out campaigns using a demo version of a bulk mailing program that appends a message along the lines of “This e-mail has been sent with an unregistered version of XXX.” In the last week I have seen at least two examples of this from reasonably large companies.
I’m sure that both of these companies thought they weren’t spamming but despite that intention both of these companies actually were. Note to world: If you send promotional e-mail to one of the addresses used for feedback to my newsletter or my columns and you offer me the chance to “unsubscribe” you are definitely spammers. Why? Because I never register or subscribe to anything using those addresses which means that you aren’t managing your lists or you have purchased crappy lists from some lame list broker and you don’t use double opt-in.
My final pathetic Web applications malpractice is not keeping a logged in user within their login. By this I mean that after a user has logged in you should never have to ask him again for any details he has already provided. Just the other day I was on a Web site and I wanted to send a question to their technical support. I had logged in and I was in a secure HTTP session yet the support page asked me for my first and last names, my e-mail address, and the last four digits of my social security number!
There are many more Web application malpractices going on out there and I’m compiling a list for a future article on the subject. If you have any thoughts or examples of Web application malpractices, let me know.
