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The 8 deadly Sins of Web design Designing the perfect Web site is never easy, but some folks think that they should use tricks that were never, ever actually meant to be used… these folks are Designers from Hell! Thos of you that are old enough to remember the launch of the PostScript laser printer will doubtless recall the tendency early owners had of using every one of the thirty-five fonts that came with it. “No problem with that!” you may say… but all on one page? Nononono! The thing is, some Web designers (and by Web designers, I mean every last man woman and his or her dog that has a Web site anywhere) apply the same sort of thinking to their home pages. No doubt they look fine at the moment our Designer From Hell (hereafter, the DFH) stumbles across them somewhere on the World Wide Web, but, after the DFH has bent the trick to his own purposes… well, the only reaction they’ll get is unspellable , unpronounceable and usually only heard in the smallest room after a very, very good night on the town. The Scrolling Menu From Hell (SMfH) Take, for instance The Scrolling Menu From Hell. This actually exists, I’ve seen it, and in more than one place. The DFH on the site I have in mind saw, somewhere, a block of text scrolling in to a web page somewhere and thought “I know, I’ll have my main menu do just that – what a brilliant effect!”. So, you go to the home page of the organisation he’s designed the site for, the background graphic loads (in the wrong size – but that’s for later), the society logo loads, some text loads, but where are the links? Are there any static links at the bottom of the page? No! The top? No! The only menu starts to scroll slowly, v-e-e-e-e-e-r-y slowly, from the bottom of the page. Not so slowly that you can easily fire off a click at a link, no, not that slowly, but, on a 1280x1024 desktop, and with the browser set at maybe 1024 pixels wide and over 1000 high, it takes fully two minutes to finally creep into position. In the meantime, it crawls over a background picture that features exactly the same colour as the text (yes, he’s redefined the links colours as well), so you can’t read ‘em anyway. Finally, you get to click a link. Now, when this DFH made the page, he obviously designed(?) it for either 640x480 or 800x600, as hinted at by the background picture. No doubt when he checked it on his own machine (not, obviously, across a slow Internet connection) it all happened in the blink of an eye. He’s obviously never checked it on the Web, though, or with a bigger display. The Unreadable Text from Hell (UtfH) DFHs the world over love this one. They decide to set the background colour of their Web pages to black, or dark blue, or, heaven forfend, pink. Well, we surfers can forgive that, mostly. But to then set their text in dark blue on the black, or dark green on the blue, or anything at all on the pink, and we have no chance. What’s the default colour for a hyperlink on the Web? Blue, with an underline. So what colour should you not use for your background? That’s right! Blue! Unless, that is, you want to be the top DFH in the world. The Unloadable Picture from Hell (UlPfH) This is another DFH trick. They spot a lovely picture – they may even have taken it with their own top-of-the-range Digital Camera, following all of the good advice held in these pages. It may be the most perfect picky the world has ever seen – 2048 pixels wide, 1960 pixels high, 32 bit full colour, beautifully composed, exposed and transposed. So what do they do with it? You’ve guessed it, they use it as a background picture to their pages. All two megabytes of it. Or they make it integral to the content of the site, vital to your understanding of the words that it contains. All two megs of it! Even if you’ve got time to wait for the blessed thing to download, you can’t see it all in one lump. The Unfittable Picture from Hell (UfPfH The corollary of the UlPfH is the Unfittable Picture from Hell. Again, it’s a background picture. It’s at a sensible resolution – 600 pixels wide, maybe, by maybe 400 high. It fits nicely onto a maximised browser on a 640x480 display. But it tiles on anything bigger, and looks foul. But it gets worse. It’s a dark picture, so the DFH decides to use a light coloured text over the top of it. That’s fine, as far as it goes. The thing is, of course, that the background picture is last to load, so you can’t read the light yellow text against the white background that’s there until the picture finally swoops in. ARGH! The Font(un)Manager from Hell (FuMfH) This breed of DFH must have had a PostScript laser printer the day they were launched. He uses every font known to man – well, actually, he’s checked out which so-called “Web-Fonts” are available from the Microsoft site, and which fonts are shipped with every copy of Windows, so he’s done his homework. This is a good thing. The bad thing is that he then uses every last one on his home page. And in all sorts of colours. His site looks like a cross between Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat and an explosion in a type foundry. The Counter Breeder from Hell (CBfH) This is a specialist DFH. He’s so hell bent on making sure that he actually gets paid the fractions of a cent he gets from the banner ads he carries all over his site that he installs a counter from every free source he can find – on every page! What’s more, none of them are invisible, and they all use a bit of JavaScript to do the business, so while you’re loading the page, it’s visiting ten or twelve servers, clicking the counters round, one by one. And they all show different figures. He’s related to… The Banner Ad Collector from Hell (BACfH) Somebody told this DFH that you can make a few bob from hosting banner adverts. He’s joined all sorts of affiliate marketing schemes, all of which would very much like to have their adverts in the top 100 pixels of the page. So he’s got 400 pixels of adverts before you get to anything readable. And at the bottom, or to one side, he’s got links to every version of every browser known to man, every online service offering a $30 bounty if you can get folks to sign up. Somewhere on the site, there’ll be some text to read. Somewhere. The Colour Blind Splodger from Hell (CBSfH) I’m colour blind. That’s no secret. So I’ve learned the hex codes for colours, and learned that you don’t put light yellow over white, dark blue over dark green, and so on. The CBSfH, however, isn’t colour blind at all – he’s just got really poor taste, and a monitor that isn’t working properly, linked to a graphics adapter that’s well out of kilter. He’s never heard of web-safe colours, has no clue that red-green colour blindness is endemic in over 10% of the world’s blokes, and like most of out DFH types, suffers badly from a lack of visitors to his site. No-Hit Wonders In fact, all DFHs have this problem. Some only have one set of letters after their names. Some have two or three. The really bad ones have the lot – they use every DFH trick on the book. You’re not a DFH… are you? More Surfer from Hell articles: |
