Website Design No-Nos

[Mr Initial Man]

What would you consider as web design dont's?

I've considered:

Background Music
Flash
PDFs

[aj_nsc]

Why Flash? I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of it (probably because I don't know how to make good flash banners) but why is that a website don't? Do you mean making a solely flash-based website, or just a banner? I think the latter is fine, although I never use it myself.

[LeeU]

I would think each one has it's place, given the type of Web site and its usage. Although I would say the background music should be an option for the visitor.

[KDLA]

1. anything that winks, blinks, or nods at me continuously
2. anything that does not have the ability to be hushed
3. backgrounds that you continue to see for ten min. after turning away from the comp. screen
4. using the IM style of writing for web content
5. using translation services for web content without checking the accuracy of the web translation
6. pop-ups
7. the assumption that everyone out there has your exact computer, platform, monitor, and browser

KDLA

[Sunny G]

Excellent idea for a thread, Mr Initial Man.

Well, here are my big don't-even-think-about-it web no no's.


In page ad's. I hate these. The flash ones can blot out the entire page, and sometimes have sound or music; so annoying. However, I do understand that this may be the only way for one to finance their site. The Google ad's are OK though: small, minimal, out of the way.
Different pages for different browsers or resolutions. Haven't these developers ever heard of CSS?!
Not scaling graphics to the size they will be displayed as. This makes the loading time WAY too long for a graphic of that size.
Animated GIFs that take way too long to load. A 200x100px animated gifs should load quickly.

[scragar]

a big no-no in my book is this one I found on a page a few days ago:
"It appears you are not using IE, please download Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 from the microsoft website and return."
no sorry for not supporting a good browser, no message why, no support for those of us that use non-windows OS's, nothing. What happens if I was using a mobile device that wouldn't support such browsers?

Large pages - since I got a vastly capped net I've noticed that large pages are often bloated.
Images when text is king - yes, that image look nice, but can I change text size, colours or copy the text easily for quoting? no! then don't bother.
Tables - yes, tables are nice for a few things, but anything more than tabular data is overuse and misuse.
Flash - not a big hate, but since I can't see any info about it in the status bar I avoid clicking any flash(or flat out block it) for that purpose.
no CSS. I like user stylesheets, I make a new one from time to time for various sites, why do some sites not allow me to do this by using inline styles? no ID or classes for me to pick up on so I wind up with stupid rules like: "body>table[border=0]>tbody>tr>td>table>tr>td{"
page sizes - I often have a window shrunk down to about a quarter of my screen, that's 500px - scrollbars, just so I can see more things at once, DON'T force me to scroll horizontally unless 100% necessary(eg I requested a full size map).

[Watts]

<LMAO>3. backgrounds that you continue to see for ten min. after turning away from the comp. screen</LMAO>

ROFL!

Background music #1 pet peeve for me. I don't have speakers so I can't hear your fav song by screamo, m'kay.
Ads that open/close and cause page to resize while you are trying to read it cnn & local newspaper site (statesman.com) for example. I guess they've never heard of place holders.

[NogDog]

In general, I think the main problem with so many sites/pages is taking the Marshall McLuhan approach that "The medium is the message," emphasizing the use of "gee whiz" effects and "bright shiny objects" at the expense of expressing the content clearly, quickly, and in an easy-to-use method. Content should be king, and everything else should be chosen carefully to enhance the communication of that content, never to get in its way, always erring on the side of simplicity when you're not sure.

The preceding can be totally ignored at your discretion (and at the risk of driving traffic away) if either (a) it's a hobby site for which you don't care how many see it, or (b) you have "heroin content"* that people will want to see over and over regardless of the means you've chosen to display it.

____________

* Coined by Vincent Flanders, I believe

[Mr Initial Man]

"Bright Shiny Objects"... now there's a description I can use for something distracting on a webpage.

[TJ111]

1. Big Corporate/Company Websites are always wayyyy overbloated for some very basic things. If it takes 10s+ to load each page on a 3mb/s connection, I'd expect your "Product" interface to not have to reload the page each time I click something.

2. Splash Pages. If I go to a website and have to sit through some dumb, annoying flash animation (commercial) just to get to your site, I'll most likely just leave. As someone said, content is king. This is acceptable for international pages though where laguage/country selection is needed.

3. Bank websites. 90% of the time they seem like there we designed by a ape pounding on a keyboard.

4. Crappy Navigation. I should be able to get to your website, and in a maximum of 3 clicks get to where I want to be. Not spend all day clicking through pages trying to find what I'm looking for.

5. Terrible search algorithms. When I was in college, I'd often go to my Universities website to find a calendar for holidays and days off. Typing in "calendar" returned things like "Football Schedule '06", "Unheard of Group Calendar", "Professor Whoever posted an update to his Calendar". It's admirable you tried to write your own search algorithm, but I mean, just pay the tiny amount for Google's really nice one.

6. Annoying ads. Some pages require ad's for business, which is acceptable to me. But ad's blinking "You've Won!", playing some business pitch (sound), or expanding to huge when you innocently mouseover them is obnoxious. Use images or google adwords.

There's more, but thats all I can think of right now.

[Mr Initial Man]

no CSS. I like user stylesheets, I make a new one from time to time for various sites, why do some sites not allow me to do this by using inline styles? no ID or classes for me to pick up on so I wind up with stupid rules like: "body>table[border=0]>tbody>tr>td>table>tr>td{"

That may be due to using ASP.Net to build a page. I'm finding that that language is NOTORIOUS for trying to think for you. :mad:

[KDLA]

That may be due to using ASP.Net to build a page. I'm finding that that language is NOTORIOUS for trying to think for you. :mad:

Not only that, but if you open a page up in ASP.NET, it inserts table code around everything, like it can't live without it! :eek: :D

[DanielSmith]

there are different standards, for users, for Search Engine ,for Ad and so on