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What a Site!
Dateline: 10th March, 2002
I'm not the most patient of men. I have a colleague who, a number of
years ago, told me that I was his teaching role model: "When I
grow up," he said, "I want to be a cantankerous old git like
you."
I was flattered! And I congratulated him on the accurancy of his perception.
I am cantankerous, and some things really annoy me. In life,
of course, if someone annoys you, you often have no choice but to bite
your tongue and get on, making the best of a bad job, but on the Net,
if a site annoys you, you can just click the mouse once and you're out
of there.
I can't do that when I'm surfing theatre sites, however, for I need
to be able to tell you what I find there. So I thought it might be a
good idea to devote my annual general look at theatre sites on the Web
to those little annoyances which I - and many others - find totally
off-putting.
Splash
Screens
You know the sort of thing: you go to a site and watch while a big image
downloads and then discover that the only text on the page is one word:
ENTER. If you're a fan of Joe Bloggs, actor, and you go to a site devoted
to him, then perhaps you are perfectly happy to wait for a pic
to download, only to be told that you have to move to another page to
discover what's actually on the site, but I doubt it. I suspect you,
like me, want to get to the meat. If you must have a big photo of Bloggs,
then put it inside the site, but if you make it the front page, I can
guarantee that you'll lose at least half of your visitors who'll move
on before the pic has downloaded. Let the front page show us what your
site has to offer!
Flash!
Blink! Awful!
Flashing, blinking, spinning, bouncing, twisting, turning animated gifs!
One's OK (possibly), but two? three? half a dozen? more? Come on! Why
not just write in big letters all over your front page: I am a rank
amateur with no sense of design whatsoever!
With pages like this, you don't know where to look. Every time you
start to read the content, your eye is caught by something flashing
or blinking or spinning...
No
Status Bar
When a page is downloading, I like to know where I am. I like to see
what's on its way: a jpeg, perhaps, or a gif. I don't want to look at
the status bar and see the same message - "Come and see our latest
show!" - repeating time after time, after time, after...
Netscape users get even more annoyed, because their status bar tells
them the percentage of the download completed so far (Come on, Bill
Gates: why not incorporate that excellent idea into IE?).
Cheesy
Music
Now if an amateur operatic society wants to put a recording of their
favourite song from their last production on their site, why not? say
I. But I'd like the choice of clicking on a link (or not) to hear it.
What I don't want is to have to listen to cheesy Midi tinkle-tinkle
"music" whether I want to or not. It's the Web equivalent
of that awful stuff some companies' phone systems force you to listen
to when you're on hold. I think they do it to drive you away: "we
don't want to speak to you, so we'll make you listen to excruciatingly
badly reproduced Vivaldi or Mozart in the hope that you'll hang up in
disgust!"
Please, don't embed sound files in your pages. Let us choose whether
or not to listen.
Under
Construction
I don't know of a better way to annoy visitors than to give a link to
something that looks interesting, only for gim/her to find, when (s)he
gets there, the words, "This page is under construction. Please
come back later." You've wasted your time, because I, for one,
certainly won't be back!
Why make a link to something that isn't there? The best thing to do,
of course, is to make no mention of a page until it appears, but if
you must mention it, don't make it a link. If it's there, but there's
no link, most visitors will automatically assume that it will be coming
later, and they probably will come back - and they'll be able to tell
at a glance if the page has arrived online.
Don't
Get Flashy!
Just because Flash exists, you don't have to use it. Flash movies take
an awful long time to download, so make sure that they're worth looking
at when they finally arrive. If a Flash movie adds to the site's information
or to the experience it offers, fine, but if you're just using it because
you can - forget it!
Want
more? Go here!
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