Have a blog or a Web site? You better not do these things

Guy Kawasaki writes an extremely insightful post about anathema behaviors for online publishers:

Here are his top ten no-no's:

1. Enforced immediate registration.
2. The long URL.
3. Windows that don’t generate URLs.
4. The unsearchable web site.
5. Sites without Digg, del.icio.us, and Fark bookmarks.
6. Limiting contact to email.
7. Lack of feeds and email lists.
8. Requirement to re-type email addresses.
9. User names cannot contain the “@” character.
10. Case sensitive user names and passwords.
11. Friction-full commenting.
12. Unreadable confirmation codes.
13. Emails without signatures.
14. Supporting only Windows Internet Explorer.

Yes, I know Kawasaki said 10 and delivered 14. But he's right, on all counts. Read his article if you want to understand exactly why these things are bad for your readers and you.

And don't just wave your hands and say "I don't understand that much about tech to be fixin' these things": get the fark off your comfort zone and do whatever it takes to start learning how to fix what's wrong. Which is usually no more than a clever reading list of information that already exists on the Web. Just fucking Google it.

Oh, if you're blogging, then you better pay attention to one more thing: you need to link. I've always said so -- it's self evident -- and now Scoble is voicing his support for linking as well. Oh, and linking to outside blog posts is a great way to gain pingback links, in case you didn't know.