A great blog post from the summer, published on the DataSalon blog and written by Jon Monday, caught our attention recently. Written in celebration of 25 years of the World Wide Web, the blog post looks ‘back on some design features from the early days of the Web’ which have been consigned to “browser history”.

Or at least they should have been.

At DOAJ, we review hundreds of journal applications every month from all corners of the globe, covering every topic imaginable. The applications themselves are always of varying degrees of quality and, sadly, so are the websites they refer to. From mid-December 2017 to mid-September 2018, our Triage function rejected without review 1754 poorly completed applications! Many of the reasons for rejection without review refer directly to a poorly constructed, poorly signposted website.

At least 6 of the items in Jon’s post are still seen by the DOAJ Team on a regular basis: hit counters; guestbooks; blinking text; scrolling text; animated gifs; and under constructions signs. So saying that they have been consigned forever to the bin may not be completely accurate but it certainly is wishful thinking on our part!