Chris Poteet’s 10 Greatest Web Design Taboo List
Chris Poteet | Jun 30, 2006 | 11 comments
Every web designer has a top 10 list of things that piss them off in web design. I helped teach a class on introductory web design, and I constructed the following list to hopefully keep those students from making the same mistakes I did.
- 1. Be cognizant of other viewers and demographic.
- When we design for the web, we must understand that the majority of the time your website will not look the same as you see it on your screen. Web design is a difficult field, because the designer has some many constraints in designing their sites. Here are a few considerations when you are designing:
11.) Don’t switch font size mid-article
12) Don’t devote a third of your page to Google Ads
This is a neat article…
I agree with everything you said except for the flash comment. A flash module could add a great depth to a website. But, that being said, too much area of flash is unattractive.
He didn’t mean a flash “element” he meant a ghetto flash INTRO that you have to search around for the ’skip’ link to bypass. Course many peep avoid the skip link at all the momo’s
Peace
‘Reaver
No, I think he meant Flash in general, he covered the intro aspect in its own number. I would totally disagree that Flash is a bad web tool. I make almost all of my sites in Flash, and more sites are moving towards that. Flash is a great tool for tutorials, seminars, etc. I would suggest Flash over powerpoint any day as well.
"They will use the notorious <font> tag, or if they use CSS..."– speaking of taboos…Overall good points, but the art itself requires flexibility. It must be understood that there are specific times that most of these may be broken – few and far between as they might be.
For instance:
- “Using different client-side programming languages” Right, avoid using .Net and you should be fine. It’s good for your page to have a fallback from javascript, but not really a requirement as almost all reasonable browsers support this. Lynx users, too bad – you can download my page in LaTeX if you really want to see it.
- hidden frames work wonders for -allowing- bookmarks in AJAX web apps.
- ‘necessary content’ can be permissible in images, if the images include appropriate ‘alt’ attribute text, which is required in XHTML anyways.
- WYSIWYG Editors… I was a notepad guy until recently. It’s a very good idea to always write the code by hand. That said, I love Dreamweaver, and although I don’t use the WYSIWYG features, I’ve found that it generates very sane code (as compared to Frontpage which creates a monster not suitable for your children to view). As a text editor, it works fantastic!
- Flash can be infinitely useful as a tool or component if integrated well.
I’m sure 2advanced will be running to take the ‘ghetto’ flash down.
I’m going to link to this article in my Journal tomorrow (July 1, 2006), but I’d like to point out that the title of your point #6 is confusingly worded. It would be much clearer if you changed it to “Separate your presentation, behavior, and structure.”
13.) Don’t program a song to play when the site loads.o-one wants to hear a midi version of “Hit Me Baby…”.
13.) Don’t program a song to play when the site loads. No-one wants to hear a midi version of “Hit Me Baby…”.
Thanks…hopefully people will recognize this soon.
I am a Photoshop fool, I like building in PS/IR then saving as html (from IR), opening in Dreamweaver, and bouncing between GUI and code, especially when tagging and placing banners.
Image Ready makes such beautiful tables, and if you play with the settings, it will name your slices along with roll-overs, etc, so you dont have overlapping images from page to page, eliminating extra download time…unlike my first attempt at building my page… But I’m far from an expert, this is my first and only website thus far, and ive yet to make a dime off it.