Atheism

Politics

Memes

Mind

Matters

String

Random

Interact

Feedback

Email

Links

Debate

Home

On the web many people are ageless and sexless. You cannot tell how popular their sites are or who they are writing them for. Arturia The Great may for all we know be a fifteen year old boy from Buffalo, a dissident Professor from Lagos or the 45 year old wife of the pretender to the throne of Albania. Web counters are of little value. They can be reset to whatever figure you want, I started mine at 6500, which was the total for the previous counter, but I could just have easily started it at any number I felt like, or I could manually boost it by a couple of thousand every week. Counters that appear on index pages often register multiple hits when a visitor navigates through different pages.

Why do “webmasters” try so very hard? It is not difficult to make a website that is readable. Just stick to a few limited techniques and master them.

So many webmasters (I am tired of using quotes, just imagine me reading the word out in a sarcastic tone of voice) think that a background image behind their text is compulsory. What is it for? What does it actually do? In most cases it just makes the text harder to read. For me the job of a background image is to reduce the starkness of the page, if you use it to try and achieve more than that you are likely to come unstuck.

Unless you are looking for pornography or music text is likely to be the main resource for carrying the message you, as a visitor, want. That is likely to be the case for a long time to come, maybe even indefinitely. I cannot see myself wanting to communicate by voice when text is faster to absorb by the consumer and more true to the intentions of the producer. Live communication is flawed because you have to find an audience who wants to share the same slice of time with you.

I don't know where to begin in listing the most popular design errors on the web, so I will just gush forth a random list:

Too wide columns of text.

The human eye is lazy, we don't like working our way across wide columns. Look in any newspaper or magazine. You will see columns. They don't have to use them. They could just put everything right across the page, but it would look terrible. On the web columns are not really practical except for small pages. Visitors are resigned to vertical scrolling but resent horizontal scrolling and constant "back to top" clicking.

The solution is to use margins, tables or frames or a combination of them to reduce the main text column to between 8 and 20 words wide. By using HTML 4 you can also use styles to specify a bigger than average amount of leading, the space between the lines. This makes it easy for the eye to find the right line. It also increases the "whitespace" on the page which makes it less threatening.

Too wide everything.

I used to design on a 800 x 600 pixel screen. I now have a really big screen, and usually run at 1280 x 1024 pixels, much wider than that used by most of my visitors. To use such a screen size for web design as if it is the normal size is a recipe for disaster, you will design a wonderful looking page that looks a dog's dinner at lower resolutions. In the days when 800 x 600 was as big as I could go when I came across a webpage with horizontal scroll bars I cringed and counted to ten, if I hadn't found a very good reason to stay within ten seconds I was likely to be clicking my back button. If you use a big screen I suggest you try using your browser in less than the full screen mode for both design and navigating of webpages. The main advantage of higher screen resolutions is to allow the user to run more than one application window at a time, if you try to make everything fit into a fullscreen window there will be tears as there is an enormous difference between 1600 x 1200 and 640 x 480, no website can look ideal in all those sizes.

Graphics for everything

When you load up your own page most of the time you are loading from your cache, it is very easy to forget this and so fall into the trap of allowing yourself to pile on graphics without a thought for download times. The fact that you can load it quickly enough is irrelevant, your visitors don't share the same server and they haven't got the images cached on their hard drive. You know what the pictures are for, you know what content lies beyond, the visitor doesn't, all the visitor sees is empty screens and download progress indicators suggesting they are in for a long wait.

I used to have a series of button images for my navigation bar. These used to be loaded by the browser almost randomly as the traffic on the 'net interfered with the passage of the data packets, sometimes one or two of the buttons were delayed in being received by several seconds or even failed to load at all. Every image was bigger than the text equivalent and it took time for the browser to identify where to load the file from (direct look up or cached copy). Admittedly all those delays were momentary, but they add up, and the cumulative effect is that pages rich in graphics take longer to load than plain text equivalents, but have no real benefits for the visitor. In contrast my text navigation bars load as a single event virtually every time.

I can so I will

I can do JavaScript, look, here is the time in Paris, here is a picture of something unconnected with the theme of my site that looks like it is reflected in water, for no particular reason whatsoever, aren't I clever? It will be loaded soon, just give it another minute or so... Hello? I said... Where have you gone? Oh, the browser's crashed, it does that sometimes...

Look at my prizes

Here is a logo for an award I won for great website design, I don't know who it's from, it will appear in a minute or so, hang on... There's another eight of them to follow.

It moves

Look at my little “Under Construction” sign, isn't it cute? Oh, it's not loaded yet, hang on, the little man will start to dig and there are some flashing lights as well...

Most graphics are a waste of download time, animated graphics even more so. Is that picture the most important thing on the page? If it isn't, why is it attracting so much attention to itself?

If you want to see a dancing website you can find one, but why would anybody want dancing horizontal lines or dancing buttons or blinking text on a site that is supposed to have content on it? Web designers should use animation like great writers use exclamation marks, very sparingly, to make a distinct point that needs to be made.

Colours

Some colour schemes are terrible. Blue text on red backgrounds, are they out of their minds? A web page is meant to be read, that involves looking at it for prolonged periods, it is not designed to catch your eye as you drive past. It has to be pleasant to look at, or at the very least not painful. Certain colour combinations are only suitable for magazine covers, billboards and the breast area of women's T shirts, places that you are not supposed to be staring at from close range. If you insist on using garish colour combinations to create an effect at least confine it to a “splash page” and not to a page you want people to spend time looking at.

Paint it Black

Why does everybody think you can only have a cool website if it has a black background? Black backgrounds are hard to read, especially with bright red text. If you must show your Gothic / rock / art student credentials by using a black background at least have the decency to use pale grey for the text. Black backgrounds are the ultimate cliché.

Multimedia

Why?

Why do you want to play music when the page loads? Is it really necessary or are you simply showing off? A little MIDI tune is not too bad but it is better with an off button. Actually, come to think about it, there is hardly ever a good reason to have music playing in the background as you read a site, it only distracts your attention from the real content. If I ever see a piece of video starting to load automatically I leave immediately. I consider it the height of bad manners to kidnap a users system and play unsolicited multimedia at them using their own modem time. A web author should always treat the visitor as a guest, not a target.

Multimedia takes up huge amounts of webspace. Most personal websites, the actual content, the important stuff, will fit comfortably on a single floppy disk. Why increase that with huge video and audio files? Think very carefully about why you want to have such files, unless you have a good reason don't do it.

Warnings

Caution: you are now entering a region of extreme pretentiousness. If you are not offended by what you see please tell me and I will try harder. Grow up.

No content

Some of my favourite sites break many of these rules. I can forgive any of the above faults individually or even in combination but a lack of content is unforgivable. I have come across sites that take three minutes to load the index page and at the end of it you have nothing. No links. No content, not even a page of holiday snaps.

If you have nothing to say please say it somewhere else.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited