Web Page Peeves

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Touch the Flame : One Thread

Well, I got almost a full entry out of it. What're your web page peeves? People that bitch too much? Animation? MIDIs? Go ahead. Vent. We feel your pain.

-- Meghan (faeriebaby@hotmail.com), April 10, 2000

Answers

You touched a *very* raw nerve with the MIDIs. That's one of the ways to get me to never visit a page again...start loading up on the force fed music.

-- Rick Pali (rpali@alienshore.com), April 10, 2000.

I could be mistaken but didn't a certain someone have midi on her website? Actually I believe they are still on the various pages. Well it's been phun n now that we got that str8 I'll talk to u l8r thnx. ;)

-- Kelly McGowan (jacksfan30@aol.com), April 10, 2000.

Ok, this is a wicked personal subject for me because not only have I been doing self-publishing (first in print, then online) for close to a decade now, but my full-time day job is working as the web coordinator for a small college.

The really sad thing is that many of the problems you discuss with * personal* homepages exist in the professional world. When I started here there was no coordination, no College template, each office had their own set of pages designed by a student, rife with hideous backgrounds, huge colored text, animations, MIDIs and the worst of all, the BLINK tag. Many of them also had no content, just a staff list or an under construction sign.

Three years later some things have improved, some have not. Basically where people learned to trust me the site is good. Our athletics site, for example, is great. They create the content, which is their job (i.e. updating scores daily, writing game summaries, etc). Our designer has created a nice template. I run it all through a database and sew it together. IT works.

Other parts of our site suck. PAges that have not been updated since 1996. Content that is more about the internal administrative structure of the college than an explanation of what this department does and how it will help students.

The worst in my case was the library, who had a hideous wedsite for years that was organized horrendously. I was charged with redoing their website and had to redo it four times because they really didn't want to give it up. One of their complaints was that I made all the text left justified and the same size, which they felt made the pages "boring." These are fucking librarians. Every book in their library has type that is left-justified and all the same size. Does that make evey book boring? Did Moby Dick suck as a work of literature because it was printed in black and white? Is The Jungle not worth reading because it has no animations in it? Is Howard Zinn a bad writer because all of his text is left justified?

If people worried about good content, plain design would be all that is necessary to make their pages exciting.

-- David Grenier (retro@retrogression.com), April 10, 2000.


Negative, Kel. I defy you to find any midis on my pages. (Heh. I know this because I just checked the directory and there aren't any there, but hell, whatever.)

-- Meghan (faeriebaby@hotmail.com), April 10, 2000.

O.k. you HAD midi's on your page.

-- Kelly McGowan (jacksfan30@aol.com), April 10, 2000.


I'm going to post here today only because Meghan is whining that I get people to post in -my- forum and no one posts in hers. Not true, Meghan. I'm a lazy forum hostess and it's a miracle I have anyone posting at all and I think your forum is doing so much better than mine (so there). Anyway, websites that annoy. Websites with so much javascript on them that they crash my browser. MIDI's and especially embedded MIDI's that have no way for me to turn them off. Overly artsy websites that are vague, obtuse with no real substance and harder than the devil to navigate. Websites with a billion animated graphics. Online journal websites...oh, wait, forget that last one.

-- Sasha (sasha@restraint.org), April 11, 2000.

When I am on the Internet I am looking for content. I am searching for information about something (technical info perhaps, or maybe I want to buy something or whatever)... or if it's an online journal, it's because I want to read what they have to say. I like clean design. Let me say right up front: I am not a good artistic graphics designer but I appreciate good design.

No matter why I am surfing the net, I am probably not looking for a multimedia presentation. I am not interested in listening to music unless that was the purpose of my search. I don't want to watch animation unless the animation is needed to get a point across. I don't want to have to wait and wait and wait for a graphics intensive site to load (unless the whole point is to see those graphics). I don't need to suddenly see java error messages popping up on my screen.

Yes, okay, so I have not changed the look of my index page in four years... well, I like that clouds and sky background... I do think my journal entry pages are much easier to read since I've been using tables to restrict the width of the text compared with when I used to let the text fill the screen. Hey, I said upfront that I was not a graphics artist.

Jim

-- Jim (jimsjournal@yahoo.com), April 13, 2000.


i hate overly artsy pages... and i also hate the traditional porn page layout... i wanna see a total high tech porn page... that would be hilarious.

-- tim(b) (notekaudio@aol.com), April 13, 2000.

Meghan - While I'll agree that some of the things you bitched about are deserving of your ire, I fail to see why you don't apply to them the same disclaimer you gave for your rant: "Hey, I'm not making you read it." Why would you spend time at sites that you don't like? Also, here's a relatively unimportant caveat: You ALWAYS spell 'sentence' and 'favorite' wrong. What's a 'sentance?' And only British people have "a few of their favourite things..." :)

-- Runt Smurf (tap@keg.or.to), May 23, 2000.

Moderation questions? read the FAQ