5 things you don’t see on the Web anymore
Monday, November 15th, 2010A lot has changed over the last several years in the world of Web. In fact, I’ve been around so long I can remember when people used to complain about Netscape Navigator 4 the way they complain about Internet Explorer 6 (and they welcomed IE6 at the time).
One encouraging thing I’ve noticed over time is that even the most popular – yet horrendous – design techniques have been extinguished by demands for a good user experience. If you don’t provide a good user experience on your site, you are doomed, regardless of how much market share you have or how much you throw into your online marketing. Just ask MySpace, formerly the top social network and which finally cleaned up its act – and templates – in hopes of regaining its once-lofty positioning.
Here’s a list of five of the worst design techniques which – thankfully – you rarely see anymore:
Flash Web sites. These were created by designers who didn’t understand the mechanics of the Web, and how to design for different browsers and different conditions. Their solution was to create a design they could completely control. This often had unintended consequences, like forcing site visitors to do something that was inconsistent with the way they did things on other sites. Flash sites also don’t allow you to bookmark specific sets of content (they exist at one URL), and their content isn’t accessible to search engines (or the assistive devices used by many visually impaired people).
Splash pages. There’s a reason why everyone put a “skip intro” link on these Flash-rendered devices – people skipped them! Usability testing showed this over and over. It’s like forcing people to watch your TV commercial before they can enter your department store. Fortunately, this annoyance seems to be nearly extinct.
“this site is best viewed with…”. A few years ago, that sentence most often ended with “…Internet Explorer, version 7 at a screen resolution of 1024 x 768“. What it really said was “Our Web designers were too lazy to figure out how to design a site that worked in all browsers. Web Standards? What are they?” Now, with Internet Explorer’s market share dipping below 50% - and falling – virtually no one takes this approach any longer.
Back buttons that don’t go back. Usually deployed by incompetent, or lazy, developers who placed a javascript or redirect on one page to automatically forward a visitor to a second page upon taking some action. When hitting the back button, the redirect was triggered, sending the viewer right back where they were. What these insensitive programmers failed to realize is that roughly 40% of all clicks on the Web are on a browser’s back button, so they were triggering a tidal wave of annoyance. Good riddance.
spacer.gif. Untold terabytes of bandwidth was sacrificed earlier this decade so that less practiced designers could shim up their table-based layouts with cells that contained nothing but but a transparent graphic, often called “spacer.gif”. Table-based layouts, however, made design upgrades more time-consuming and more costly. Now, CSS-based designs and themes are the order of the day and all those spacers are no longer needed.
These, and many others like them, have gone the way of the dinosaur, rubbed out by the incontrovertible need to provide a good user experience to those who visit your Web site.
Is your favorite design quirk not listed? Let ‘er rip in the comments.
























