bluelinecity.com

We are all guilty of it at some time in our short Web designing lives. We don’t like to think back to the time when we thought a 10 foot long, completely centered Web page was "Cool". It’s not till after passing that blissful phase of misguided design, that we realize the line between an original Web site with easy-to-access information, and a moving, blinking, noisy, multi-colored tool of purgatory.

The Blink Tag - Possibly the worst HTML element ever bestowed upon the Web designing community. This tag blinks like a lazy strobe light. It’s terrible. It’s annoying. Its support should be commented out of the browser’s source code everywhere.

Animated Backgrounds - Epilepsy here we come. Unless you enjoy giving yourself a headache and or exercising your irises, don’t to this! It makes it hard to look at the text, makes the browser choke at the amount of processing it has to do and is just plain annoying.

Background Sound - All is quiet, nothing stirs, not even a mouse. You sit complacently at your computer casually surfing the net and enjoying its zen-like quality. Suddenly, the silence it broken by a loud digitized noise that is torturously hypnotic. You scramble for your speakers to try and stop it. With the music now stopped, you search the page for some type of control that lets you turn off the infernal sound. But to no avail. Soon, you feel the urge to jam WinAmp, but can’t because the speakers are turned down. Finally, giving in to your MP3 deck, you leave the site, turn up your speakers, load up your play list, and hit "X". You just lost a user to a simple MIDI.

1000 Animated GIFs - In great numbers, this has the same effect as the an "Animated Background", (see above). Number one, it takes your page 9 hours to load. Number two, most of the GIFs are on the, "Most Used and Abused List". Number three, 98% of all the GIFs don’t match the background or each other, which makes the page look like a compulsive decorator crab in a junkyard.

100 Pictures of your Cat - I’m sure your cat is really cute and cuddly and you love it very much. But when you have one-hundred 87k JPGs of your cat sleeping, eating or just looking blankly into the camera, it gets a little mundane.

Pop-up Dialog Boxes - I wouldn’t call these annoying, I’d call them nerve recking. Especially when you have them pop-up before your page loads because if you’re a Windows user, the first thing that pops into your head is that your browser illegal op’ed and is fixing to close. It’s even worse if you use IE because then it also tries to take Window’s down with it. If you have a one of those dialog boxes that won’t let you by unless you enter your name, don’t feel bad if I Ctrl+ALt+Del your window and never visit again.

Under Construction Signs - Simply put, if your page/site is under construction, DON’T LINK IT! Nothing is more annoying then going to a page expecting to find some information and instead seeing an overly used "Under Construction" animated GIF. That just wasted 3 minutes of my time and precious bandwidth.

Size 7 Text - When I have to scroll my browser to finish a sentence, that’s bad. It’s even worse if you use MS Comic Sans and the three primary colors to do it.

Broken JavaScript - You find this really cool JavaScript and decide to copy and paste into all your HTML files on your site. Except you’re a strict Netscape user and fail to realize people also use IE. An IE user then logs on to your site and gets ambushed by a mass of JavaScript Error dialog boxes. That really places a burden on your site. Users just end up trying to find a way out of your malfunctioning Web site.

And that ends my first collection of Web site annoyances. I hope we all learn from these and use them to help create a nicer, cleaner park to play in.

<sincerely> Your Angry HTML Writer </sincerely>