Stupid Web Site Tricks
Recently asked on Yahoo! Answers:
Is background music on websites to unprofessional?
[snip; was a URL]
that is my website I am working on for my uncle
I was thinking about putting some background music on it
(just a piano playin in background)is this a good idea or should I not do it?
and what changes can I make to the site to make it look better? what can I add, what should I take off?
Which provides me with an excellent segue to point out all the annoying crap people on Yahoo! Answers insist on putting into their Web sites. I’ve listed the annoyances in order, from worst to simply just offensive.
If you do any of the following on your Web site, your site is awful. If you do more than one, you should immediately remove your site altogether, because it’s a crime.
Gizmos for the sake of having gizmos: If you want to add things to your Web site because you think your Web site is not interesting, maybe you should go do something or discover something interesting and put that on your site.
Because counters, games, flashing what-nots, chat, whatever, don’t make a Web site interesting and useful. Saying something useful and interesting makes a Web site useful and interesting.
A “splash” page, for any reason: I don’t care if your Web site is in 150 different languages, or you have 10 different versions depending on browser / Flash capability, or if you have the coolest logo ever designed. Splash pages are plain old stupid.
A splash page says one of the following:
- You haven’t bothered making a home page that tells me anything about your site. Thus, your site isn’t worth reading. Goodbye!
- You’re far more interested in showing me some crappy Flash animation or logo than you are in telling me why I should waste any more time on your site. Goodbye!
- You’re too damn lazy to properly program your Web site to determine a Web browser’s capabilities. Thus, all the gizmos I’m likely to run across on your site will be poorly programmed and crash my browser. Goodbye!
Whatever the case, “splash page” translates as “stop sign.” If you use it, your site is crap.
Flashing or moving text: The purpose behind a Web site is to say something. It’s harder to read text if it flashes or moves; worse, it makes the text next to whatever else is flashing or moving hard to read, as well. If your Web site has flashing or moving text, you’re wasting both our time.
By design, the HTML DOM has elements that imply importance: H1 through H6. It also includes elements that set aside important parts of inline text: STRONG and EM. If you use those in the place of flashing or moving text, your site will index better with search engines.
Better yet, people won’t close their browser windows because your text is making them seasick.
Embedded music or video files without a warning: You are a serious ass if you embed a background music file on your site without warning people, and not just because doing it chews up bandwidth. True, these days, most people have broadband, but some don’t, and it’s wrong to attack such users just because they refuse to leap into the 21st Century or move to civilization, where cheap broadband is plentiful.
Most people expect Web pages to be silent. If you don’t tell them you are about to break the silence with your polyphonic rendition of “The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down,” it’s going to come as a shock to them. And no matter how popular your audio clip is, I assure you, many, many people who visit your site are going to hate it.
It’s even worse when you embed an MPG or other video file, because those are even larger, taking even longer to download, and almost always are a waste of time.
If your video is any good, put it on YouTube like a normal person does and embed the YouTube player on your site. It, at least, doesn’t start downloading until the person decides they want to view the video, and FLV tends to be a more efficienct video compression than MPG or even AVI, making the video download and play faster.
Not only does that save you bandwidth, it makes it a lot more friendly for visitors.
Whatever you do, warn people before they run into media clips. If I opened a book and a 20-inch TV fell out of it and onto my foot, I’d be pissed. I have the same reaction when I run into unannounced video or audio on a Web site.
And while I’m at it, if you feed a video file off your Web site, such as an MPG, which isn’t in a streaming media format, you’re a double-jackass. I don’t have to turn my TV on at 4:30 p.m. to watch the 6 o’clock news; I shouldn’t have to wait 5 minutes for the stupid video of you and your friends imitating the OK Go treadmill dance to start playing, either.
Meaningless Flash: Believe me, all your Flash animation is saying is, “I’ve learned enough Flash to waste your time and bandwidth, by animating some words and stock images into a 30-second loop that simply spits out meaningless slogans at best.” And I’m going to laugh at you if it takes 30 seconds for that animation to load.
Truth is, you don’t know enough about Flash and graphic design to use it well. I don’t know you from Adam and I can guarantee that’s the case. In the highly unlikely case I’m wrong, and you’ve put in the thousands of man-hours it takes to get good at both, you’ll still never find a circumstance where Flash was a better choice than vanilla HTML, JPGs and GIFs. I don’t know your client base from Eve, and I know that.
Here’s a tip: Don’t use Flash unless you are making a game or another interactive component. Here’s another tip: Even if you are making a game or another interactive component, don’t use Flash. Here’s a final tip: Flash sucks. Don’t use it, period.
One of the best bits of Web design advice I ever heard was this: Amazon.com spends bucketloads of money every year to research what makes a Web site customer-friendly. If you don’t see it on Amazon.com, don’t do it.
You’ll find plenty of AJAX, XHTML, dynamically displayed layers and the like on Amazon.com. And you may even see Flash in a banner or used to display book page samples. But you won’t see a single Flash animation used for navigation, and especially not to simply “pretty things up”, QED.
Linking to non-HTML documents without warning: This is especially a problem with PDF files but also with Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and the like. Nothing is more annoying than being very close to finding the information I want, only to have the next link I click launch my copy of Acrobat 7 — which takes about two minutes to load and pretty much prevents me from doing anything else with my Web browser.
Sure, I could disable PDF reading in my browser. But I want to be able to read PDF documents in it. What I don’t want is to have some moron link to what I expect to be a Web page, so that I stumble upon PDFs unexpectedly.
It takes you all of 5 keystrokes to add (PDF) inside the hyperlinked text to your damn PDF document. Let me have a choice between viewing it now and downloading it. Seize my computer up with unexpected content types and I’ll never visit your crappy Web site again.
Background images that aren’t simply small tiles: If you use an actual image as a background on a Web page, I have news for you: It’s 2007, and that crap is straight out of 1998. Don’t do it. It’s just distracting. Enough said.
Animated GIFs: Those, too, are totally ghetto geek. Unless the animation does a better job of explaining something than words would do, you’re just distracting me from your message. The same is true of …
Large, pointless images: Pictures may speak 1,000 words, but believe me, that scan of a black-velvet painting of a nearly naked warrior princess riding a winged unicorn is shouting, “You are a loser and an annoying ass.” Again, images should augment your site, not dictate it.
Using depricated HTML elements or attributes: If your site contains a single FONT, CENTER or U tag, or an “align” attribute in any text element, you’re a retard. Stop trying to learn HTML from Web pages written in 1996. Get a copy of XHTML for Dummies (With CD-ROM)
Manipulating the DOM for the sake of manipulating the DOM: I don’t want to see a bunch of stars following my cursor across the screen, or have things I’m not expecting to change suddenly do just that for no apparent reason, or have to deal with your nonsensical attempts to block me from right-clicking on your page.
Again, at best you’re simply annoying me. At worse, you’re encouraging me to leave your site immediately — after I read the source code and steal everything you didn’t want me to steal.
February 25th, 2007 20:06
I saw one website, once, where the <bgsound> was vital. It was an internal server-monitoring page. The webpage in question had 24 images representing 24 critical servers inside the company. These images would be “green” when the servers were healthy, and “red” when the servers were encountering problems. The page was on a 30 second refresh loop.
The computer sat in an operations room where staff were guaranteed to be present 24/7. But staff were not guaranteed to be looking at the green or red images!
If a server went “red”, a <bgsound> element would also be introduced. The was a .wav file with 30 seconds of silence, followed by 30 seconds of insane beeping. This way if the server went “green” after a momentary 30 second “red” spell, the beeping wouldn’t happen. The beeping would only happen if the server stayed “red” for at least two refreshes of the page.
The beeping had the nice effect of causing the staff in the room to look at that computer and figure out what was going wrong.
I taught a course on PHP once, and I used this as the only example, *ever*, where a background sound is permissible.
I still have a soft-spot for <center> and especially <table align=’center’>. I know it’s bad, but I can never figure what weird contortion of CSS does the job. Is it margin-left: *; margin-right: *;? But doesn’t that screw up on IE5? text-align: center obviously can’t deal with display:block, only display:inline. Can never remember the trick, and still <table align=’center’> works so well!
(<table>’s are like the force. They have amazing power, but great evil can be done with their power.)
September 12th, 2007 18:51
Yea, I hate web pages that make you scroll sideways, too.