Build A Better Web Site

[filkertom]

Thanks to sdorn for pointing out this year's Top Ten Web Design Mistakes.

Comments

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

The one bright point is that splash screens and Flash intros are almost extinct.

And to think I just made one for The Midnight Thud. Of course, this is what he wanted.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

How d'you think I feel? ;) Well, it was about time to spiff up the site for the holidays anyway....

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you've got Flash everywhere on your site. But it's tasteful and unobtrusive.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I at least tried to make it not the centerpiece of the site. You can bypass the intro, and the nav bar is duplicated with plain text links at the bottom. Which seemed to me to be a way to get some spiff Flash that I wanted, but not make it too obnoxious or limit people's ability to get around.

[gan-chan.livejournal.com]

Ahh yes, Mr. Nielsen. I wonder if he ever gets discouraged, since judging by the state of the Web, he is clearly not making much headway.

<polite-cough>I found number 3 especially relevant...</polite-cough>

But the music is more important.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

What I said just above. I also admit that [a] I think anyone who doesn't use a Flash plug-in of some type these days is really fooling themselves, because Flash is tremendously cool and useful, and [b] it is all to easy to overuse anything tremendously cool and useful. The biggest Flash offender for me is video; now that more people have broadband and the compression rates are getting better, more and more pages think it's perfectly acceptable to jam as many Flash ads and even videos onto their pages as possible, and there is no way to bypass many of them. A true ass pain.

[gan-chan.livejournal.com]

Oh, there are definitely sites out there that use Flash with more...*ahem* gusto.

There are also some platforms for which Flash is not available (Web-enabled mobile phones, or WebTV, for example). Flash files also sometimes do funky things when you scroll the page, which is distracting.

The intro on TSO is certainly bypassable, but all the little .swf navigation links aren't. You can achieve the same effects with CSS rollover effects - which would improve site usability for blind surfers, conserve RAM for the rest of us, and probably save your bandwidth too (since it won't load the ones people don't mouseover every time the page is loaded).

I guess it's a matter of preference. As someone still stuck on dialup most of the time, and someone who always uses non-Microsoft browsers, I suppose I'm more sensitive to things like this than the average Joe.

But like I said, the music is what matters.

[kengr]

Flash is at least sort of accessible. But only sort of. There are no flash plugins for things like the BrailleNote. And given that such devices are important to many blind users...

[kayshapero]

Hooray - now if only people will pay attention (yeah, I know...) Numbers 1 (fixed font sizes), 9 (frozen layout and page width) and 6 (bad inter browser compatability) all of which can be summed up as Forgetting Not Everybody Uses The Same Platform You Do, comprise something that's plagued the net almost from the start. And probably will continue to do so, alas.

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

I've read HTML books that have pages and pages and pages and...about how to use tricks to obstruct the person with the browser when they try to view a site "their way". I'm so old that I remember "em" and "strong" tags being considered good things because they promoted user-controlled formatting.

I'll just fogey along, now. :-)

[kayshapero]

And I'm old enough that I had been an adult for mumble years before the September that Never Ended. :-> Good coding involves creating applications that do what they are supposed to, don't do what they are not supposed to, and are easy to change when you want them to do something else, and I don't see why doing it for hypertext markup changes that any.

[poltr1]

My beef about using Flash is that it makes sites unreadable to those using speaking browsers or braillers -- the blind and/or visually impaired. I agree that streaming video is overused; I'm still in the "dark ages" of dialup.

Another great site where I learned a lot of my web page design tricks is Vincent Flanders' webpagesthatsuck.com. "Learn good design by looking at bad design."