WEB DESIGN NONO'S

[steve777]

ok some opinions here please and we can compile a list of top ten cardinal sins of web design (flash or html)

how about, (to get the ball rolling)

spinning logos
ornate background tile patterns


[Edited by steve777 on 05-06-2001 at 08:46 AM]

[Xcess]

I think its lame when people use the sound fx that come with Flash. I would say this is a big nono!

[Sapphire Design]

Not testing in both Netcape and IE to make sure everybody can view the site.

Not testing at every screen resolution to aviod horizonal scroll.

Crappy navigatoion --- usability is a MUST

Not optomizing image, so that load time is too long - (10-30 seconds is a good rule).

Centering text.

Bolding all text

Not orgainizing text

Using non standard fonts so that the browser ends up displaying the default Times if you don't have the font installed. (Yuk)

Forcing music on people....A HUGE no no...give users a choice wheather to turn it on or not.

Forcing Java applets on people.

Fonts that are too huge.

Using Microtext that's hard to see/read --(like on this board)

Having text or link colors too close to the background color.

Animated gifs....they suck...persiod

Flashing text

Using Flash and not giving an option to skip it

Flash that takes too long to load (Personally I won't wait...I'll hit the back button)

Using Images. Fonts, Sound files that are copyrighted material and you don't have permission to use them.

Placing text on backgrounds so 'busy' that you can't read the text

Having a page that's too long...nobody wants to scroll down for six miles.

Don't say "click here" grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Again...navigation...don't use all images...have text links at the bottom always...nobody wants to scroll back up to get to the navigation

Links that leaves you wondering/guessing where thet lead to...links should give me a clue as to where I'm going

Botttom line....."just because you can...doesn't mean you should.
Design with the *end users* in mind.

[Xcess]

Originally posted by Sapphire Design

Not testing at every screen resolution to aviod horizonal scroll.

I just wanted to know if you (or anyone else) can tell me how to fix this problem. I use Flash, and in the html I embed the movie so that it has an exact fit with no scrollbar. Looks good in 800x600....but in any other screen setting part of the page is cut off.

Thanks in advance!

[Sapphire Design]

If you're using 800X600 as a size for your movie it will only look good at that...at 640 you'll have horizonal scroll and at 1024 it'll be barren.

One way to make things look better would be to make to movie be like 620 pixels wide and use a two or three columed table layout.

If you used three colums you could use an image as the cell background for the left and right colums and put the flash movie in the center cell. That way the whole page would flow at any res.

Another option would be to have your flash open in a popup from a regular page.

[steve777]

on the issue of screen res - i have placed a download on my website which other users may (or may not) find useful - it is a desktop bitmap marked up with standard screen res's - i use it to manually drag the browser window so that i can see if a layout fits the appropriate sizes

http://www.bigblueballoon.co.uk/desktop_grid.zip

(wouldnt it be great if those nice people at microsft would place a toggle button on the toolbar of IE for developers that would flip the browser window between the various standard screen res's - wishful thinking i know...)

on the subject of NONO's - i was wondering what is the general consensus of opinion on POPUP WINDOWS, MAXIMISING and SCREEN HIJACKING

personally the chromeless full screen hijacking is my number one dislike - especially when many of the kind developers out there deleiberately do not place a manual escape or close link to allow users to shut the window (this can be particularly frustrating if the user is blissfully unaware of the Alt+F4 option - you would think they would all learn that, after all it is a very simple one-handed operation!)
- i can hear everybody saying " yeah right we know what sort of websites you've been visiting" - all in the name of research and development you understand...and as you all probably know, it is not solely the reserve of "the most popular type" of sites... :-)

[Xcess]

Originally posted by steve777
(wouldnt it be great if those nice people at microsft would place a toggle button on the toolbar of IE for developers that would flip the browser window between the various standard screen res's - wishful thinking i know...)

I'm with you on that one.....Dear Santa...



I remember the first time I encountered screen hijacking. At the time I didn't know about the Alt+F4 option....it wasn't pretty. To be honest...I don't mind it if the option is there to exit...as we all know this isn't always the case.

Sapphire...I have been thinking about putting the site up in a pop up window. I think it's the quickest way to fix the problem.....but do you think users find this annoying?
I don't really see a problem with it.

Thanks everyone...steve777...I'll check out the dnld.

[quistaquay]

Originally posted by steve777
- i can hear everybody saying " yeah right we know what sort of websites you've been visiting" - all in the name of research and development you understand...and as you all probably know, it is not solely the reserve of "the most popular type" of sites... :-)

If everyone knows what site you have been visiting then I would say they have probably been there too

I believe http://www.echoecho.com has a thingymujig to view your web pages to test them at different res's

[Xcess]

Cool "thingamujiger" quistaquay...I just dnld it.

Thanks

[Sapphire Design]

You can keep the icon to change screen res right in your taskbar next to the clock for easy changing:
Control Panel
Display
Settings
Click Advanced
Check "Show settings icon on taskbar"

Voila! There it stays...you don't have to reboot unless you need to check at 16 or 256 color....keep it at 32 and you can change backand forth easily.

[Sapphire Design]

On pops up....conversations I've been in on have come up divided...some like them, some hate them.

One thing is agreed on almost all of the time though...do not spawn a zillion other popups from the one...and do not have a popup auto open upon page enter so that boom, a popup files in your face....it's viewed as being rude.

[aversion]

Originally posted by steve777
(wouldnt it be great if those nice people at microsft would place a toggle button on the toolbar of IE for developers that would flip the browser window between the various standard screen res's - wishful thinking i know...)

i knwo it's not quite the same thing, but there is a useful button in dreamweaver, at the bottom right hand side, that let's you flick between different browser screen sizes, like 795x470, which is a full browser window at 800x600, i knwo it's only useful for people using DW but it's a good little thing to make use of...

[steve777]

Originally posted by Sapphire Design
You can keep the icon to change screen res right in your taskbar next to the clock for easy changing:
Control Panel
Display
Settings
Click Advanced
Check "Show settings icon on taskbar"

Voila! There it stays...you don't have to reboot unless you need to check at 16 or 256 color....keep it at 32 and you can change backand forth easily.

further explaination - i didnt mean the screen res in dispaly settings, i meant the physical pixel size of the browser window (sorry bout that)

[kaska]

just to add my 2 cents...

I REALLY hate popups (and for a while I had installed PopUpKiller to nab them all at birth- until, of course, I realised that it was killing some important content windows) However, the only thing I dislike more are small screen sizes set so that I cannot resize them myself. Believe me, nothing can kill your design faster than it being surrounded by my ugly desktop! So in this case, I'd actually prefer the smaller screen being contained in a popup so that a splash page with your own colour scheme, etc, is displayed in the background. (Is this making sense to anyone?)

and while I'm perched up here on my soap box, I'd like to just reiterate the importance of SIMPLE NAVIGATION. I'm not a designer, nor an artist, nor a person with a very long attention span, so I'm not likely to stick around a page that has a 10 minute learning curve for the nav system. (DISCLAIMER: I really love the experiments I'm finding on designer's pages for other designers, the previous rant only pertains to sites intended for the general public)...

[/2cents]

[ManTra]

On the issue of resizing browsers.. there's a nifty little program thaty'll do it for you.. browsersizer... very very neat!

get it at http://www.applythis.com/


on the subject of design nono's I think sapphire just about said it all... but on the point of netscape compatability I don't really know.. ..

as a browser it's a nightmare for designers.. if your design is slightly off standard you have a lot of problems when using frames.... that's why I personally don't like netscape anymore...

[steve777]

Originally posted by ManTra
as a browser it's a nightmare for designers.. if your design is slightly off standard you have a lot of problems when using frames.... that's why I personally don't like netscape anymore...

thanks for that link

according to echoecho.com netscape now accounts for 10% and falling

my personal opinion is that people who use netscape as a browser get what they deserve - i suspect i am one of a huge number of web designers who is getting really tired of tweaking tables and frames to display correctly in both browsers - if i am designing a site for my own amusement i often dont even bother testing it in netscape, i just place a note somewhere saying best viewed using IE (after all there is a 90% chance that they will be using IE anyway) if not....tough!
:-)

[littleisa2001]

maybe i am not getting the whole comversation right, but for what i understood youa re having problems trying to figure out how to risize the window from one resolution to the other, i mean if it's what i think is more than easy, you just click with the right mouse the little monitor icon on the right hand side of your desktop menu and it will take you to any type of resolution you ask for.


About nonos in web building.
1-Frames, i hate them, i hate to use them i hate when i go to a website and see them. ok i can take littleframes that just covers a text, but those frames on the left right, top. nono.

2- Pop-Ups i hate when i go to a website and the main movie comes in a pop-up and than from there you open more pop-ups, i believe if you are going to have several pop-ups in your site than avoid making the main movie a pop-up.

3- Fullscreen, i hate it period.

4- navigation, that hides and you have to be a magic to find out where it's and then doesn't even say where is in it, you just have to click to find out.

5-sites that have an incredible ammount of content made in flash, ok, flash is nice, it makes a site looks great but high content site in flash it makes it a misery to navigate, you have to wait for the loading everytime one hits a link and i HATE that.

7-knowing when to use flash or not. I'am making the site of toolshop ( ferramenta) how it's call? the sell tools, but have a section where the sell wedding gifts, ( a little bit weird i know) i know that most of the possible visitors of this site are going to be very commun persons that maybe know very little about surfing and that don't give a dam about drop down menus, or flash text the persons visiting this site are going there to see if he has what they are looking for, so i had to make nice but very understable menu sytem and avoid flash since lots of the normal people surfing the web when the have to go and dowloan a flash plugin they just think twice about it, so this way the visitor that goes to this site, does not havet o worry about going out of his way to download a plugin that he even don't have idea what the word "plug-in" means.

8-Remember that mayority of people navigating the internet are ignorant ( in the nice sense) the have no idea what alt+f4 is for, the have no idea what the word Plug-in means. the don't know lota of thing, i was a surfer like all of you ( ithink) were before becoming a designer, and from my own experience, when i used to navigate the web if you told me you need java enable browser i will say "WHAT IN THE WORLD I JAVA"?

[punchbear]

I'd have to respectfully disagree with the frames comment.

Frames are a nightmare because they're rarely implemented correctly, and they are indubitably, on a larger site, very hard to manage. That's not to say that they don't have their uses.
They lend the advantage of navigational consistency, which in a large, database driven site like the one I work on, is an absolute necessity.

So we can't immediately discount frames, we're designers, we're solution driven not frame-scared.

Damn, these be exciting times to be a designer, made all the more exciting by pinkslip parties all over the place...

Check out http://www.wissen.de, the site I work on, it's in German but I think it's a pretty successful implementation of a frame set. Plus we're slowly redesigning at the mo and I would love feedback from my peers!
Keep flashing.

[balthazar]

What do we want?
NO MOUSE TRAILERS

When do we want it?
NOW


I hate mouse trailers, maybe you picked that up?

[steve777]

Originally posted by balthazar
What do we want?
NO MOUSE TRAILERS

When do we want it?
NOW


I hate mouse trailers, maybe you picked that up?

the flash ones can be bad enough at times but the html ones are appalling - id rather be subjected to an eternally looping "greensleeves.mid" file

i recently came across a rather obnoxious mouse trailer on the homepage of a sport portal site - it was a show/hide layer thing with just a little white text box with the slogan "belly's gonna get you" (Reebok) - and it followed the mouse around the screen - to anybody who wasnt aware of that particular reebok ad campaign you could have been forgiven that it was a virus of some sort
[Edited by steve777 on 05-10-2001 at 03:31 AM]