White text on a black background - especially multiple paragraphs of tiny type - hurts my eyes.
Red text on a black background - especially multiple paragraphs of tiny type - makes me go crosseyed.
Red text on a blue background/blue text on a black background - especially multiple paragraphs of tiny type - makes my eyes bleed.
Bad .midis that do not have an off switch are evil.
Would you please be so kind as to KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF!!!
That is all.
Preach it Sister!
What they said.
Amen!!!
In that case how about a little DHTML pop up? 
The trouble is, most web designers aren’t web designers with any background in layout and design now that anyone can have a web page. I think some kids think it looks “kewl” to have a black background and lots of pictures and graphics and stuff.
When I designed a web page for work, that was the first thing I promised myself, that no matter what anyone wanted, I would have black letters on a white page and a minimum of graphics. The result is professional looking and easy to read (I think) as well as fast-loading. (Well, the letters in the hyperlinks are standard blue, but still pretty easy to read).
So, yeah, KNOCK IT THE FUCK OFF! And double-knock it off to those bad .midis. I listen to music from an Internet “jukebox” during the day and can’t stand it when some web site busts in with its bad music. Besides, the people at work will know I’m web surfing!
I hope you don’t really think this will make any difference, chique. We’re going to have to put up with bad web design for a while, I think.
Oh and quit with those little twatty graphics that chase the cursor around; that was clever, original and funny for exactly seven minutes in the 1990s now it’s just crappy and annoying.
I dunno. Bad design in terms of fonts and graphics seems less common than it was. My main gripe at the moment is the bandwidth assumption corporate designers seem crippled by: Flash imagemaps etc are very attractive, but not when you’re waiting on a 56k dial-up.
My other gripe is at the other extreme: the rise of the accessibility police. Just because Nielsen said it, doesn’t mean it’s true for every page on the web. Accessibility is relative to your target audience, not the lowest common denominator, and I do not expect MTV2 to hold to the same Bobby standards as (say) the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
Like Crusoe, my biggest complaint is bandwidth consumption. The website for the college at which I am currently typing this post, www.spscc.ctc.edu, has a 34k animated GIF in the top left corner. That is 11 FREAKIN’ SECONDS of GIF on my dialup. What are they THINKING? When I’m just trying to register for classes, it makes my brain hurt.
By now, all websites should be using PNG for static images (anywhere they would use GIF now), and animation should be taken care of by Flash, where ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. If it’s not absolutely necessary, DON’T USE IT. Webpages should clearly specify the size of images via height and width tags, to keep render time to a minimum. And for websites that use extensive photographs, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD turn up the compression on the thumbnails. Make the full-size ones 1024x768 at 100% quality JPEG if you want, but leave the thumbnails as 160x120 70% quality.
Oh, and for all websites that have downloadable video, there is NO EXCUSE for not using DivX. Need streaming video? Windows Media Video 8 is your friend. Use of Quicktime or RealMedia will lead to your site being hated by all.
Unless you want to watch your videos with something other than Windows.
My site is white text on a black background. I haven’t received any complaints about it. I’m currently redesigning it and using a white background, but it’s for entirely different reasons that I’m changing it.
With the exception of entirely-Flash sites that offer no HTML alternative, I haven’t seen many very badly designed sites lately. Unless you’re griping about teenager’s pages on Geocities, or something, but I certainly wouldn’t hold them to the same standards that I’d expect from somewhere like CNN.com.
IIRC, when you get a MIDI file, you can hit the STOP button in IE and the MIDI will stop. Doesn’t stop it starting, but when it’s started it should stop.
Downloadable video should not be streamed if you think the downlaoder might want to keep a copy. Maybe an alternative link to download rather than stream would be a good idea.
PNG - Note also that the Windows 3.x version of IE has not PNG support at all. IE3 is not widely used, so this is a smallish issue.
From the PNG cite site listed above, there are a number of issues with PNG support in many browsers that are still relatively common, so sure use PNG only if you don’t want a percentage of visitors to have it render.
I agree with the thumbs, but you’d be surprised how many (ahem) web designers don’t know that by simply reducing the display size of the image does not reduce it’s actual downloaded size (sheesh!).
Animated GIFS suck, but hey, whose site is it anyway. If you don’t want to be there, then don’t. Lack of visitors may suggest a change to the administrator. But an official site that you MUST use, should very carefully consider whether the animation is worthwhile or not.
I’m surprised by some color combinations (and my site probably shows this up), but I am color challenged (not color blind, I just have problems getting complementary colors going) but I also dislike black and white as being a little boring and as my site is informational only (well a waste of time may be more accurate), I like to be able to play around a little. If you don’t like the colors, then please leave or tell me.
Not much rant, but there you go (and I am not a professional designer, I just like to play around).
erm, I would disagree with you on that one!
PNG files are the “editable” images used buy Fireworks - if you upload a PNG image - anyone else can download it and EASILY edit your graphics! - NOT GOOD!
(eg - take apart the layers and filters you used to build your image).
You “work” with PNG’s, but you “EXPORT” GIFs or JPGs, and upload them - unless you don’t care about your work being ripped off!
Also, I would argue the “Flash” point you made… not all animation needs to be done with Flash - if you can get by it with using an animated GIF.
Don’t forget to see Flash, you need to have the Flash Plug-in, which is NOT standard on browsers!
14 000 hits and no complaints yet.
Check out
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com
you wouldn’t believe what people do to web sites
jinwicked: It’s the lesser of three evils. You could use Apple’s proprietary Quicktime, Real’s proprietary RealMedia, or Microsoft’s proprietary Windows Media Video 8. WMV8 at least is free to encode and decode. Someone should come up with a free/open source streaming video format. Until then…
Caught@Work: If you’re still using IE3 or NS3, you aren’t a consideration. If you want to use the web, upgrade to a modern browser. Modern versions (and in most cases, old versions going back several generations as well) of all browsers I know of have at least minimal PNG support. You don’t need to support every feature of PNG to make it usable, as whatever isn’t supported will be ignored.
Synnic: I believe you are confused. PNG images are a standard format, designed to replace GIF and BMP. They are used by many image editing programs as the default format due to their lossless compression and large feature set, but they are no easier to “rip off” than anything else. They do have the capacity to store image layers as you say, but you can simply use the “flatten image” or “merge layers” function in your image editor before you save the file. This same function is simply performed on GIF and other single layer formats by default. Flattening the image is recommended anyway, since it reduces the size of the resulting file.
I suggested using Flash for animations instead of GIF because the resulting files are often much smaller and have more features and better image quality. I realize that a plug-in is required, but most users already have the plug-in. A better solution is to simply not use animations:)
Generally I find that sites that are that aggressively bad in their design tend to be aggressively bad in their ** content ** as well, so no great loss.
Well sorry for point out that some people, sure not a great percentage, still use IE3. It’s better than IE4 but not as good as IE5 or 6. Not everyone takes up technology as fast as others.
It was more to illustrate the point that PNG are not a universally suitable alternative to GIF. But then your point was that all websites should use them.
Well, mine doesn’t, it may, but it won’t now. So I take your advice, but I choose not to implement it.
runner pat you beat me to posting that link!
Personally I HATE pages with lots of animation, Flash intros, pop-up Flash intros, pop-up anything without forewarning and my interaction, any stupid menu navigation system running on anything than plain HTML (or at least a text alternative), dark web pages, web pages with fixed 20" widths from some fuckwit designer who happens to have a huge widescreen monitor but doesn’t realise I can’t even get to the damn scroll bar, and so, so so many other things.
Pages that don’t let you go “back” for some reason but keep you in a loop. Pages with invasive and controlling javascript that won’t let you open a frame in a new window.
Kill them ALL!!!
My websites are “low tech”. I don’t adhere to the accessibility police (I use a little Flash now and then, for text) but I try to make my sites friendly to older computers. It wasn’t too long ago that I picked up an ancient 386 with 4 megs of RAM, and was able to get around on the Internet (after a fashion) with a copy of Opera 3.x (which can run on 4 megs of RAM!).
I don’t know if my current sites are designed so that Win3.x visitors have a great experience, but not a day goes by that I don’t have a person using Win 3.x or a 3.x version of one of the browsers. It’s nice to know that they’ll be able to access my sites. (I have two rather large “resource” sites - one on art and drawing, one on art, pottery, photography, etc. - who needs flashy animated goodies for that?). I understand that some sites look great, or are enhanced by some more advanced features, but these things are not needed on my sites.
I also am guilty of using “creative” color schemes. Usually pretty harmonious, (I hope). Like, a pale blue background, dark blue text, that kind of thing. Nothing too gaudy, and hopefully legible.
I remember recently visiting a site that I found on a web design message board (the guy was asking for a “site check”.) It would NOT display on Netscape! I got a message telling me to get IE, instead of the site! I told the guy that I refused to change browsers just to see his site, and I was treated to a whiney “Well, I don’t know why people don’t always upgrade to the latest and greatest browsers as soon as they come out” bullshit. Forget it. The web designer should be thinking (at least a little) about their visitors. Not to the point that they have only simple text (for the Lynx users out there) but come on! To completely ignore a major BROWSER? That’s crazy talk. That’s the way you drive away visitors. Not everyone wants to download a 20 - 40 MB browser upgrade, and HOPE it’ll install well on their computer. Sometimes they figure, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Hell, I’m still running IE 5 on my PC.
I also HATE (with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns) the midis that automatically start. And I ALWAYS “skip intro” when I come to a Flash intro page. I am on a 33.6 connection (the best these Hooterville phone lines can manage, apparently) and I am pretty mindful of bandwidth concerns. I agree with the others here who have said that bandwidth problems are far worse than ugliness. I just won’t wait for a huge site to download. There is NO EXCUSE for someone to expect us to download 100 Kb image file right away. Thumbnails, please! And, thumbnails (depending on dimensions) should be about 5-10Kb each! Come on!!!
That is because I love you, Matt. I would never in a million years tell you I picked ‘select all’ just to read your site.
No offense 