Why do people still put up stupid timewasting front pages on the web with nothing on them but one link, or worse, some stupid animation that's meant to show how cool they are? Why doies any serious website bother with this stuff? "Click here to enter" is a mark of the pornographer, the spammer, and the timewaster. There is no excuse for it on a serious website.
Presumably people are looking at the page to see something, so you should show it to them. If it is a commercial site then you can lose customers. If it isn't then politeness and pride in a job well done call for some real content. If only a menu.
Which makes me wonder what the other bad signs are. Here's my first attempt at a little list of things which make me think the site is likely to be of little use to me, or at least make me want to be careful. They never will be missed.
These aren't just things I disapprove of on aesthetic grounds (well, some of them are) but things that I associate with timewasting websites. It is frighteningly easy to think of them - here are about twenty:
- Large animations on first page: "click here to skip intro" - yuck!
- everything in one big flashy graphic map
- attempts to hide destinations of links
- a programmatic attitude: a site that wants the user to look at a series of pages or objects in order, rather than giving some kind of choice. We didn't build the Net so that they could reinvent cable television.
- no contact information
- - except a prominently displayed phone number.
- pages that turn off the status bar or address bar in the browser
- pages that try to resize the browser window
- pages that open new browser windows without you doing anything
- pages with non-standard conventions to indicate links
- a request for your credit card number before you have committed to buying anything.
- a request for your credit card number with a promise not to charge to it (Does anyone still fall for this scam?)
- URLs on geocities, yahoo, excite, AOL or MSN (Not a prejudice against people who can't afford their own domain name - BTinternet isn't so bad and there are loads of good Demon sites)
- no links out.
- - except to other almost identical websites probably run by the same people
- no internal links either.
- loads of links that all go to the same place.
- deep chains of links to find obvious information. Like the site of a major supermarket company that can give you a list of all shops in you area. To find the street address of a shop - probably the first thing someone thing someone looking at the site wants - you have to click on the name, get a banner page with a graphic and ads about special offers and so on, click "enter", get another list of 2 or 3 local shops, click on the one you want, see information about opening times and what departments the shop has (but not the street address)_, click on a link for "details", get the name of the manager and the phone number of the shop, and click *again* for street address and a map. Why?????????????
- many advertisements (not universal this - the wonderful imdb.com is stuffed with ads, you just have to put up with them - I think I have learned not to notice them - as have a few million others, which is why the ad-driven Internet business model is dead)
- Little "TM" signs every time the name of any product of the company is mentioned. A big turn off, unnecessary even under US law, meaningless anywhere else.
- legal notices threatening to sue you if you link to their page without authorisation.
- sites that don't work with scripting turned off. They should degrade gracefully and ask you to turn scripting on when you actually want to do something that requires a script.
- pages that don't work with cookies turned off.
- pompous lectures about how cookies are safe. So what? If the customer doesn't want to use cookies, why force them to? Applications that really need them are one thing (say the Science Citation Index - one of the bestest web sites in the universe) but sites that demand them before the user has actually tried to do anything - it just creates bad feeling. (like the post office postcode site used to - useful, I used it, but WTF did they want the cookies for?). If they need cookies or scripts they should ask for them when the user does something that needs them.
- internal links with no text - it is fine having a picture of a museum where you can click the doors to wander around the rooms and the display cabinets to see the exhibits, but you want text links as well. Real text, not just ALTs (though any serious site must have ALTs).
- opening frames inside frames. Why do people still do this?