Don’t bother clicking it. It’s dumb. It’s a horrible sports bar, and all I wanted to do was to get directions there. Instead I got some moronic movie loading up, and a link that said “Click here to skip movie.” Fuck yeah I skipped it. I then got to a page that needed to load up. 1%… 2%… 3%…
When it finally loaded, I was hit with a blast of loud music that was cranked up to 11. It used up all of my system resources, and was loth to let me navigate away.
Why in the holy name of fuck must some web designers be so “clever”? They pretty much guarantee that I’ll never be back.
I always find it hard to beat this site, which belongs to a man who actually wants people to pay him to put all of their possessions in his van. On purpose. The mind boggles.
Any web designer that insists on creating a large, slow-loading Flash splash page needs to be clubbed mercilessly. Even worse are sites that use Flash and have no HTML alternative page… Flash has its uses on the web, for animations and other specific stuff, but whole websites designed in Flash are the devil’s work.
Then there’s the people who just have no sense whatsoever of organization or layout. Dead Badger’s link is a perfect example.
Another thing i hate is designers who can’t or won’t optimize images for the web. As a result, you get thumbnail images that take about 3 minutes to load. When you open the image itself to find out what the fuck is going on, you discover that, instead of a 160x120 pixel jpg or gif, it’s actually a 2400x1800 pixel bitmap that has been resized using nothing but the HTML image tag. Fucking morons.
I admire a Short Circuit reference as much as the next man, but it’s the way he feels the need to continually remind you that he’s alive that bothers me. Was I supposed to expect an undead removals expert? There’s subtler pleasures in there too; check out the “Special Offers” page (assuming you can find it). Said offers are contained in a table rendered in black text on a black background; only the borders are visible. Awesome.
Even knowing what to expect, I still winced at the one you linked to. I have to believe there’s a significant number of web designers out there who have never actually used the internet. At least Johnny 5 has the excuse that he’s a removals guy who has clearly made his site using Frontpage or something. How can someone both have the technical skills to make that flash monstrosity, yet also the complete and utter obliviousness to any sort of usability standards that would make him actually want to? It’s a mystery.
IME it’s restaurants who are the Flash addicted,content scorning web maulers. When I look up a restaurant web site, I’m looking for the menu, contact info and hours of operation. Knock off the 45 second disco influenced opening page, anything involving flash, and while I’m on a wee tear, d’ya think you can crank up the font past an 8? I’d rather not have to get my nose on the screen to read your phone number. Thanks muchly.
Now that you mention it, it’s most often restaurants. Many of them now offer virtual tours of the insides. How about offering some fucking directions so I can go see for myself?
The Flash frenzy was even worse a few years ago, when it was the Hot New Thing despite the fact that many fewer home machines could handle it. You can chalk it up to web builders being more concerned about the competition than the client, and more concerned about wowing the client than creating effective communication.
Sadly, the market puts such pressures on any industry—sometimes you gotta keep up with the curve for no better reason than that everyone else is doing it.
I’ve always heard that Flash-only sites are usually imposed from the top-down by executives who think a moving, noisy, colorful page is attention-getting and attention-keeping. They view the Internet as just another medium for making a commercial, not understanding the difference between pushing information to someone and that person trying to pull specific information from you.
My personal web peeve is when you need to create a password to set up an account, but you’re not informed of the half-dozen retarded rules the password must follow. Some won’t allow a password longer than 8 characters. The most retarded will have let you type in, say, a 24-character password but will secretly truncate it down to 8, 14, or 20 characters. You won’t know until you try to log into your brand new account and can’t.
Secretly swap out their T1 line for a 56k dial-up connection. Then ask them to check it and see what they think. Check back in a half hour to see if it’s still loading.
Far, far, FAR too many websites forget that high-speed is not universal. If I have to wait for umpteen images and flash files and shit to load (worse–for every damn page), my cake is going to be burnt to a crisp before the site loads.
That’s fucking awesome! If I lived in England, I would so hire this guy. When he asked me why I chose him, I’d tell him it was because I liked his site ironically.
I think this line from his site says it all, really:
I hate that too. Look I don’t care if I need a 6 character password, I don’t care if it needs two numbers in it, but don’t assume I know this, I go for as minimal a password (they’re secure, but small) as I can get away with on first bat, and then modify from there it will save me some time if you tell me your parameters. A small text under the entry box will do fine, thanks.
(password must be at least 8 characters and require two numbers).
I mean, maybe there’s a whole community of people laughing and scorning my website for its poor design and horrible layout, or something, but how can anyone put together a page like either of those and not fairly quickly think “Hey, you know, this kind of really fucking hurts to look at…”
Is it that they just don’t care? Are human tastes and perceptions sufficiently variable that someone could find those sites not painful to view?
I once had to design a website for someone who wouldn’t listen to my advice for ways to improve his ideas. So I had to put it together exactly as he told me to.
He had the idea that emphasising certain words and phrases was a good idea, so he would ask me to bold, italicise, or underline some of the words. Only by the time I was done, 95% of the words were either bold, italic, or underlined, many of them all three. It rendered the entire text useless, making no words emphasised at all.
No matter how many times I tried to show him how this was a bad idea, he wouldn’t listen. He knew that emphasis was good, so therefore it should be as he wanted.
I think the problem is that people can be blind to visuals, but completely adamant on principles, to the point where they cannot see sense anymore.