I’m creating a new on-line magazine that I’ll tell you more about when it’s closer to being open. This has caused me to do a lot of re-thinking about web sites, how they look and how they work (or don’t). Normally, when I encounter bad web design I just kind of gloss over it, I look for the content I went to the site to see and ignore the rest. But the more I look at the actual design
of many sites, the more bad design I see--design that could easily be fixed if people just used their heads.I think the single biggest mistake web designers make is to take things for granted. They take for granted that their site visitor will know how to navigate their site, or understand what their weird section names mean. They take for granted that their web visitor has the latest browser or plug-in. They take for granted
that their site visitor is so utterly fascinated with what they have to say that they’ll wait forever to download this Java applet or that ActiveX component. Take too much for granted and you can easily alienate your visitors, leaving you with none.
Here are some of the some of the things web designers (and browser manufacturers) are doing in record numbers that make me want to scream:
>Suitable for framing
Yes, I know i/us uses a lot of frames. But to tell you the truth,
I’d prefer if it didn’t. I'm not a fan of frames for two reasons--first, it's very hard to bookmark the right URL when frames are used, and I bookmark a lot of pages that I want to get back to. It can also be hard to print framed pages--because even though you've selected the right frame, it's not always that frame that prints (at least not for me!). I know people either love frames or hate them--I love the idea, but in general, I don't
like the execution under either Navigator or IE. i/us’s site visitors tend to be technically savvy people, like you, so for them frames are OK. But for most users, frames are a pain.
>Useless applets
I think Java is a great idea, and occasionally I see applets that are really useful.
has a very small, very clever plug-in to display real streaming video. Both of these are small, fast, and actually work.
But many sites contain truly useless applets--things that try to display changing advertisements, or show me animated graphics that would have been better off as animated GIF’s. And for some reason, many sites manage to contain applets that just don’t work, at least not for me. I don’t know if no one tested them, or if they only tested them on one machine rather than several. Whatever the reason, I call these things “bandwidth-junk” because they just suck up time and
bandwidth and then deliver nothing.
Before you stick an applet on your page, ask yourself if it’s really necessary. If it’s not--lose it.
>InactiveX
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just my IE4 browser that doesn’t want to use any ActiveX component even though my security settings say it should (more about this later). But they aren’t working for me, and sites that depend on them are losing my favor.
Take msNBC (please). This site uses a clever, but unnecessarily
large and slow ActiveX thingee that displays the section of the site, then pops out story items--much in the same way the Start button on Windows 95/8 pops out program choices. It’s a good idea, but even when it works, it takes so long to load that I stopped using msNBC in favor of abcnews.com and cnn.com and even the excite.com custom page.
Now my browser has inexplicably started to refuse ActiveX components, but it still makes me wait while it first downloads them. This makes sense--not.
Contrast this with i/us’ own Java-based navigation bar--you see it when you’re in the forum, such as
It’s small. It’s fast. It’s efficient. It’s useful. It works. If you’re going to use some fancy kind of navigation, at least make sure it’s all five of these things.
At least the msNBC site is somehow smart enough to know when ActiveX isn’t working, because when it doesn’t, it then displays a GIF of the navigation buttons. Even so, you first have to wait for all the ActiveX junk to fail. I have better things to do with my time.
Of course, this is the same site that makes a lot of content inaccessible by providing it in streaming video format that didn’t work for me, even when I viewed the page with IE4! Yes, I
know that msNBC is a cable channel as well as a web site, but please, can’t we just read a transcript on the web? Do we really have to suffer tiny, jerky, blotchy, in-other-words-lousy, video just because Microsoft is in some kind of multi-media turf-war with RealVideo? Not me. I’m not playing that game. That’s how you vote--by not visiting a site that you don’t feel treats you right.
>Stupid link colors
I don’t mean to pick on msNBC (and I’m sure I’ll get e-mail from
people who say I must be using a Mac and hate Microsoft, neither of which are true), but the last time I checked, msNBC’s site used black text and black links, and somehow even managed to use CSS style sheets to make it so that the links weren’t underlined! In other words, they achieved the dubious distinction of having made the links invisible! It doesn’t require much more than half a brain to realize that this, as my mother used to say, is “NG” (not good).
Before this, they used a green for links that was so light on Windows-based machines that it was virtually unreadable on their white background. I don’t know who is designing this site, or if they’re designing it on a Mac and not looking at it under Windows (which would be odd for an MS company), but they’re making things far too hard on their visitors.
I’ve been to sites where links seem to disappear after you visit them, because they turn into the same color as the background.
What good is that? You’ve seen it once and now they don’t want you getting back there? That’s good thinking!
>Sites that have names that are different than their URLS
i/us is a great site, no doubt about it. But why does the logo say “i/us” while the URL is i-us? OK, I know that i/us can’t be typed into a browser’s address window, so their logo says i/us, but I don’t care, I don’t think it’s smart to name a site one thing that’s
close but not exactly like your URL. C|net is also non-standard. In both cases they could have created logos that were identical to their URLs. So why didn’t they?
Chris Dickman, one of the founders of i/us says I’m making too much of this and that most people only type a URL one in a hundred times. He may be right, but I type URLs all the time, and I find it easier to remember those that are the same as the name on the site.
Obviously, this hasn’t hurt either of these sites, both of which are doing very well. But before you try this, ask yourself if your site can afford to take the risk.
You’d think that this rant would be enough to for one month, but no! Next column: More peeves.
