Comments on: Ten Things Web Designers Forget

By: guldam

guldam — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 05:08:18 +0000

TEXT ISN’T TEXT
I’m working for a traditional brick and mortar company that has a web presence. The designers that I write html/css for are the most anal people I’ve ever met. Every page they “design”, is a one off design, even when they are all part of a feature section. They don’t want text to flow naturally. Rather they want me to code the page with hard breaks after each line so that it matches their comp. Oh, and the text is styled in Photoshop so that it’s impossible to make text look exactly like Sharp, Strong, Smooth etc text. Their solution is to just chop up PSD’s and use images to replace paragraphs of text. One designer told me that she hated HTML text. And I have to make her happy all day and everyday. No wonder my predecessor relied on images for paragraphs of text. There’s no winning.

BLOAT:
Page sizes range from over 200k to over 500k. God forbid that their users actually have dial up connections.

HORRIBLE CODE
Usability, re-usable and semantic markup, standards, external stylesheets etc are unheard of. The whole site is a bloody mix of table based layout, a half hearted attempt to use some CSS layout, and massive inline styles. Oh, and through in some font tags just for fun.

Rant over.

GulDam

By: WEbsite design guy

WEbsite design guy — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:13:30 +0000

its amazing how many people forget about background colour

By: mitch

mitch — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 04:15:16 +0000

14) Whimsical use of “web 2.0″.

my site is web 2.0-esque, but I never claim its actually web 2.0. However, get a site that has a few rounded corners, a violator, and voila: they think its web 2.0.

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:39:46 +0000

@Josh Thanks for the comment, of course the JavaScript wouldn’t be inline and it would be unobtrusive with a progressive enhancement. The example is just a quick and dirty implementation?

By: Josh Johnson

Josh Johnson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:23:17 +0000

#11 on my list would be bad javascript that insist on popping up links in new windows. In this age of tabbed browsing, I often open links in new tabs only to find them blank because the web developer didn’t know how to craft their popup links in an accessible fashion.

http://livepipe.net/blog/programming/one_true_window_open

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:38:11 +0000

13) Web sites that insist on resizing MY browser window. It’s MY browser leave it alone. These sites are as bad as a popup spammers in my view. If I want my screen full page, I’ll set it that way. If I want it at 640px x 480px, I’ll set it that way.

BTW I’m not replying to some comments, be lucky that I didn’t delete it.

By: Daniele Simonin

Daniele Simonin — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 18:07:21 +0000

Good article Gary!
I’m italian so i don’t complain

Thanks

By: Penguin Pete

Penguin Pete — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 16:24:58 +0000

Did we also forget spelling, punctuation, and grammar? Come on, guys, stop it! Stop churning out sites with table layouts; you know it's wrong. OK, it’s faster and more profitable, but you know that you are just screwing the client. Tables are for data, not layout. Normally I don't complain - English isn't everybody's first language - but this time I am struggling through each sentence trying to figure out what it says.

By: Matthew Hartman

Matthew Hartman — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 02:03:21 +0000

What a great article! Honestly, this has been a good read, keep these kinds of articles coming =)

By: Adam Schilling

Adam Schilling — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 02:36:38 +0000

Heh. There is no fold.

I love hearing that people hate to scroll, that they hate to click. I even hear they hate to read. And, I often hear they hate one more than the other.

People must really hate the Internet! Personally, I think these complaints usually have more to do with content (or lack thereof).

Here, I’ve got an addition to #7 — more for developers, admittedly: “I know you don’t think my browser can handle your web site, but (please) let me give it a shot.” Many things bother me, but being locked out of a site is the worst (even if my browser can pretend it’s a different user agent).