I enjoyed reading Web Bloopers by Jeff Johnson. The book describes “60 common Web design mistakes and how to avoid them” with lots of helpful screen shots. I don’t do much Web design, but it was entertaining to recognize many of the bloopers in sites that I’ve visited. Being divided into 60 small chapters, it was easy to read a bit at a time over the course of a few days.

I think that this book could be quite profitable as a “checklist” when examining a Web site for usability issues. (In fact, the official Web site for the book has a printable summary of each of the 60 points.) It can be difficult for developers to see the forest for the trees; objectively comparing each blooper to the Web site under development could help find potential problems with usability.

To test that theory, I decided to evaluate the Web site of my employer by the standards in this book. Fortunately, it avoids most of the bloopers, and the ones that are there are generally minor. I’ll send the results to the Web guys; hopefully they’ll find the evaluation useful.