Pains of Webdesign: Top 10 Pet Peeves
Web designers and developers do many things, and they don’t do many things. Some are great, some aren’t so great, and some are down right terrible. Here’s my Top 10 list of things that drive me up the wall:
- 10. Breaking the back button. Much of the time this behavior is caused by redirects, so I can easily get around it by right-clicking my back button and selecting the page I wish to go to. But with the AJAX craze, I’m suspecting that we’ll see some new sites pop up soon that consistently break the back button. I sure hope not, though.
- 9. Resizing the browser window. I’m very picky about the size of my window, the proportions need to be just right. When sites (usually done in Flash, I might add) mess with my window, they don’t just maximize it–they RESIZE MY PERFECT WINDOW. So what if I have control issues, it’s my browser.
- 8. Clipart. Why? Why, why, why? If you can’t design, hire somebody who can. Clipart is so 90s.
- 7. Using frames so I can’t link to a specific page. I wonder if these sites have any idea how much traffic they drive away by not letting me link to their content?
- 6. Blogs not having an RSS feed. I don’t care if they feed the whole articles, or just a snippit of them. But at least let me know when you update your site! Do you want me at your blog or don’t you? Don’t answer that.
- 5. Messages that say “this site is best viewed with bla bla bla.” Can someone say, “tacky” ? If you’re not going to take the time to design your site so I can see it, I’m not going to take the time to change my settings for you.
- 4. Lots of text with no formatting/spacing. I can’t stand looking at text-heavy sites that don’t format their text or use appropriate spacing. line-height is your friend…
- 3. No Favicon. These are not hard to implement. Make yourself a small picture then go to this page and follow the instructions. It’s that easy, and then I can tell what sites I have open in my 20 tabs.
- 2. Playing crappy music without giving the option to turn it off. Yes, people still do this. And it drives me crazy.
- 1. IE only sites. IE is like clipart, only worse. It’s like…clipart that lets your computer get infected by fatal viruses.
If your site falls somewhere in this list, don’t be offended. Just fix it.
So that’s my list…We all have one, what’s yours?
Funny you have at #3 no favicon, but I’m currently not seeing one for your site (FF 1.5b Mac OS X).
Michael: Hmm…I do have one (should be a white swan over a black background). Not sure why it’s not being picked up. Try doing a hard refresh, see if that straightens things out.
everything myspace.com…. nuf said
Web browsing pet peeves
Elliot calls them web design pet peeves. He did such a great job of framing these in terms of the user, that I think anyone who browses the web will understand many of the same problems. Here are the three I’ve been seeing most lately:
I agree! I really hate IE-only sites. *rolls eyes* I try to make my sites at LEAST IE and FF compatible!
Oh, I need to get myself a Favicon. I never realise it’s so important.
A list of very good tips from you.
With regards to the Favicon the coding on your site is 1 char wrong
Currently:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />
Should be:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" />
Unless you tell it to search for the favicon in the root directory of your site it will search the current browsing directory and fail to show.
Regular users may not notice this as FF tends to cache the icon and re-use it while surfing in the domain.
Hope this Helps, Regards David
David: thanks, I’ll have to fix that.
[...] en! It’s very funny becuase I was reading this person’s article called “Pains of Webdesign: Top 10 Pet Peeves” humm…I am not reall [...]
Hmm Mcafee always installs a extension for me to download VirusScan instead of IE.
Breaking the back button is high on my list.
I have no problem with a broken back button as long as information isn’t too hard to access. I would have a problem on a huge news site, but on a small time site, or the new ajax turbo db admin, it’s perfect.
Not sure if David’s suggestion did it, but yes, I’m seeing the swan now.
@Michael:
Great. Yeah, I did something similar to David’s suggestion.
Thanks for letting me be aware about that. It shows up for me (and most regulars) because it works on the homepage then like David said FireFox catches it and displays it for the rest of the pages. I didn’t realize if you haven’t been to the homepage it wouldn’t show.
I feel sorry for the “Kapusta Brothers” now…
Some people don’t like AJAX
Looks like some people are complaining already about AJAX
But with the AJAX craze, I’m suspecting that we’ll see some new sites pop up soon that consistently break the back button. I sure hope not, though.
…
Nice list. On the topic of frames, I have a question then. It’s actually been troubling me for a while. How would I go about implementing a site so that part of it stays static (does not refresh because it will be in Flash) and the navigation of the rest of the site still works? The only solution I came up with was frames, but again, like you said it’s annoying to link to.
The other method I came up was make one page where all the content is driven by Ajax so the page does not refresh, and add anchor links to the url whenever a link is clicked, so the back button will still work. But that’s not very practical considering I’d be doing all of that for just one Flash application on the page.
I’m stumped, any ideas?
Does having the menu reload cause a problem? Because I’d say just have the menu reload with the rest of the page like you do on any site, as that would probably be easiest.
Or is there a problem in that?
I’m quite agree with Elliot to make menu reload with the rest of the page. Since it’s a swf, it would have been cached by browse. So, I supposed there shouldn’t be any performance problem.
That would work, except it’s not a menu — it’s an mp3 player. Since the site is mostly focused on that music, I think it is necessary. But then being all the web-standards geek I am, I don’t want to completely make the site with Flash, because a lot of the content is plain text and deserves html pages. So the dilemma occurs.
Ah…That is a problem.
The easy way out would be to allow visitors to launch a seperate window with the mp3 player in it, but that can be annoying sometimes as well. Might be your only option though.
I agree that you should be able to have it playing the whole time (without refreshing it), that’s a tough one.
Anybody else have any ideas?
In this case, I think launching a second window is better than using frame. Frame is never a good design method. Either way, make sure you let the user to start the player themselves. I hate it when suddenly some music start when I’m surfing. I’ll have to find the player, tab by tab (in Firefox) to turn it OFF!
Good point about no music at start. I never launch separate windows just for sound/music, mainly because I’m not a fan of popups.
Quick question. Does the url http://www.domain.com/#archive/something.html seem awkward? That’s actually just an anchor for the main page, which Javascript could interpret and display information accordingly (Ajax). It also looks like a real url that people could note and remember, except for the #. Best of all, any new links do not require the refresh of a new page.
I’m not a fan of pop-ups either. But I see most of the online player does that.
For the URL, personally I wouldn’t expect any # for a URL that I’ll need to remember and type it manually. It’s not a problem if I don’t have to remember it.
Thanks for the input guys!
Hope you figure something out that works for you.
Good job.