Lately, I’ve been reading the Linux Distillery on iTWire. I enjoy the column but really dislike the design of the site. Look at these old-school buttons to navigate to new pages:

That raises another usability issue: pages. Man, I dislike pagination on a web page. I suppose it’s useful when you write a 5000 word article but I don’t think I want to read 5000 words on a website. I wonder if web magazines track bounce rates by pagination. Occasionally, I’ll read the first page of an article, see the pagination and bounce.

But on the Linux Distillery, I don’t think their articles are long enough to deserve pagination. I bet they paginate in order to serve more ads. In which case, they are putting the advertisers’ desires above the user’s which always creates a poor user experience.

Additionally, they have incredibly un-friendly URLs. Mouse over this link and check out the URL’s long query string.

Those aren’t good for users and they aren’t good for SEO.