| 1 |
 No Under Construction signs.
Yuk! A WWW page is a continual process of development, and
reconstruction, and things are never finished. It's amazing
how WWW design has evolved, and we are really just at the
beginning phases of its development, so things are changing
fast. If your interested here's
one. (and
some more information on the No
Under Construction campaign).
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| 2 |
No Long Lists of URLs with no explanation
of why anyone should use them. If I've given some recommended
links, I've tried to explain why they would be used.
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| 3 |
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the
regard for it is a lost tradiation" |
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Jacques
Barzan, Columbia University.
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No Frames. Frames are horrible, and have never really
been properly supported (especially in Netscape). So, if
in doubt, use tables [well I've still got a few frames,
but they are legacy pages which are, [whisper] under
construction]. The big problems with frames though,
include:
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You cannot bookmark them properly,
as the only page that you can bookmark is the main page
which contains the link to the initial pages. Thus to find
the page that you were initially interested in, you must
search through all the links that you previously followed. |
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They are often used
with a scrolling bar on one or more of the 'pages',
which makes it difficult for the user to scroll though the
text on the page (the Page Up and Page Dn buttons are much
more convenient when scrolling through pages of text.) |
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| 4 |
A Home button on my Home page. Having
a Home button on your Home page is a bit like having a sign
in your own home which says 'You are Here'. Ooops. I've
forgotten to put the Home button on this page. Oh well,
you'll just have to use the Back button!
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| 5 |
No missing or fossilized
links (well, there wasn't the last time I looked).
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| 6 |
No tacky animated icons.  There's
nothing worse than going to a page that's full of animated
icons. One or two is acceptable, but I've seen some sites
with five and more (I'd better not link to them, or I'll
get in trouble. As a homework 
exercise, why don't you find them and email me the one that
you find with the most animated icons on a single page).
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| 7 |
No pages with gray
backgrounds (you know the ones that really show their
age, as gray was the standard background a few years ago).
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| 8 |
No metaphors or puns. You won't find
a picture of a networking lab with little post boxes for
sending emails, and so on.
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| 9 |
No
garish text designs, such as red text on a green background.
Click here
if you want to see a good, tounge-in-cheek, version of a
garish WWW site.
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| 10 |
No references to parochial things
(well apart from
Falkirk Football Club, which is a small soccer team,
who play half way between Edinburgh and Glasgow).
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| 11 |
No Top 10 lists.
Oh dear. I've broken this one a few times.
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| 12 |
No inconsistent use of design. Well
this is a difficult one to follow for a personal WWW site,
as I've not got a large corporate team working on the
pages, with ASP/CGI/CSS/PHP3/etc scripts
to automate the whole process. I've used different Flash
animations to try and experiment with a few ideas,
so please forgive these.
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| 13 |
No horrible and tacky
background. There's nothing worse on your eye than a
horrendous WWW page background, which is repeated over and
over again. Well, apart from one that animated, as these
make me travel sick (here'
one of the most horrendous that I've ever seen).
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| 14 |
Little use of standard clip art images.
I've tried to
originate some of the graphics shown on the pages, but I'm
not very good at drawing, so you'll have to forgive my attempts.
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| 15 |
Missing graphics files.
WWW page development
systems (such as Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage) are
sometimes not very good at differentiating between a local
file (on the hard disk), and a WWW-based file. Thus when
a user uploads their files the page will be viewable to
them, as they have the graphics file locally on their computer,
but is invisible to everyone else.
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| 16 |
No hit counters. I never really seen
the use of hit counters, and what they really say. In many
cases, especially in personal pages, the hit count can show
that the page isn't really being hit that often. The optimum
case is when the page is being hit once a day, and that's
because the owner goes to it to determine the bit count.
I think a better measure is the time spent on a site
(or the number of pages accessed per hit), and not the
hit count. One day I'm going to write a CGI program
which measures the time spent on a site. Until then you've
really just going to have to guess how many times my site
has been accessed.
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| 17 |
No layers. Layers
are excellent in the design of WWW pages, especially in
Flash design. They allow the designer to properly specify
how the page is revealed to the user (lowest layers first).
This allows important initial content to be displayed first,
followed by higher-bandwidth content. Unfortunately not
every WWW browser properly supports layers, so in most cases,
the layers are converted into a table. So for now you'll
just have to do with my tables. |
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Well. Research has shown that most users only spend an
average of two minutes on a WWW site. So you've had your
two minutes reading this list, so goodbye. Maybe if you
have time, come back and everything will have changed.
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