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Topic: What is the worst thing about website designs?

Jason Black
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1723
From: Myrtle Beach, SC, USA
Registered: Nov 2000

posted 02-13-2005 01:27 PM

Pop-ups, (Although I'm sure Phil likes these)

Pop-unders,

Excessive Flash use

Sites that require you to *click here* then *click here* then *click here* to get to the one page you want to view.

Slow loading pages (and I'm on cable!)

Bright colored text... resulting in rentinal burn to view.

Sites without nudity... (just kidding here - I do NOT, I repeat, I DO NOT want to see Brad, Phil, Joe, TWP, or anyone else nekkit on this site!)

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David Buckley
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 525
From: Oxford, N. Canterbury, New Zealand
Registered: Aug 2004

posted 02-13-2005 01:28 PM

quote: Brad Miller
That's because you are using an evil browser

Of course I'm using a evil browser, as all browsers (except Lynx) are evil. However, my choice of evil browser is (and has been for some time) Firefox, and (in cookie terms anyway) it is set up identically to the example.

In more general terms, "site optimized for firefox" is just a specific example of the evil that Scott describes as a feature list, the very concept of "site optimized for <anything>".

(And I've just checked one more time - on search result right click / open in new tab does not go where one would expect)

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-13-2005 01:53 PM

Sites that put up lots of pictures which don't have thumbnails!

If I'm looking for some piece of information on your site, I don't want to wait for 1,000 stupid pictures to load before I can read the page. Even if the text loads first, before the pictures, the words will jump around the page as the pictures load. Of course, I could tell the browser to wait until the page is fully loaded but then I'd wait forever to see anything at all!

I HATE sites that don't account for the fact that the majority of users are STILL dial-up! My boss tried to make me design some pages that had movies in them but he didn't think I should put in some low-speed options. I had to explain to him that dial-up takes 5-7 minutes per MB to download. (On average.) He wanted me to put up movies that were 10 MB or more! When I told him that MOST of the people who are not connected through the college network would have to wait 50 minutes or MORE to see the content he was puzzled.

When I go to a web page, I give it 10 seconds to start loading. If it takes longer than that I'm GONE! I don't imply that the page has to be DONE loading in 10 seconds. I has to be doing something that lets me know that SOMETHING is happening. I just want to be able to see enough of the site to tell if it's worth waiting for the rest of it to load. Otherwise, it's CLICK! Bye-bye!

Flash = EVIL!
Java = EVIL!
Huge pictuers & movies w/o thumbnails = EVIL!

Sites that check for USER AGENT and put up messages that say, "This site won't work unless you use <browser X>.", are EVIL! Especially when I instruct my browser to lie about its identity and then the page loads PERFECTLY! Sites that do that usually get a "Fuck You" letter from me!

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Jim Ziegler
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 753
From: West Hollywood, CA
Registered: Jul 99

posted 02-13-2005 02:19 PM

Sam, if you are looking for smaller JPGs of one sheets, you can find them on movies.yahoo.com.

Randy, a question for you. How do you make it so that a segment of a page only loads if the user is on broadband? Is there code that can detect connect speed?

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Phil Hill
I love my cootie bug

Posts: 7595
From: Hollywood, CA USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 02-13-2005 04:14 PM

I LUV the word "website"...and "email" too... so c'mon Scott, get with modern times!

From the *website* Dictionary.com:

quote:
Usage Note: The transition from World Wide Web site to Web site to website seems to have progressed as rapidly as the technology itself. The development of website as a single uncapitalized word mirrors the development of other technological expressions which have tended to evolve into unhyphenated forms as they become more familiar. Thus email has recently been gaining ground over the forms E-mail and e-mail, especially in texts that are more technologically oriented. Similarly, there has been an increasing preference for closed forms like homepage, online, and printout.

quote: Jason Black
Pop-ups, (Although I'm sure Phil likes these)

Only when "we" talk Jason... hubba hubba!

(BTW: You're over limit on your M/C for all the calls to 976-PHIL.)

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Brad Miller
Administrator

Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99

posted 02-13-2005 05:47 PM

David, hmmmmmmmmm you are right. I never tried to open a new page from the search engine. Interesting.

I don't know how he did it, but somehow this is Phil's fault! [Razz]

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Phil Hill
I love my cootie bug

Posts: 7595
From: Hollywood, CA USA
Registered: Mar 2000

posted 02-13-2005 06:19 PM

Brad, I have magical powers...

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Randy Stankey
Film God

Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-13-2005 10:42 PM

quote: Jim Ziegler
Randy, a question for you. How do you make it so that a segment of a page only loads if the user is on broadband? Is there code that can detect connect speed?

You load a small thumbnail picture of the "poster frame" of a movie. In order to watch the movie you have to click on the picture or a text link to view/download it.

Go to the videos page on this site to see how its done.

You could also have a link somewhere in the home page of a site that allows the user to choose their dial-up/broadband preference. That preference could also be stored in a cookie.

I don't know if there is a way to automatically detect a user's network speed. One could statistically infer the user's speed by the time between clicks on links. You know how much data you're sending down the line. If you count the amount of time between a given user's responses you could simply do the math. If your pages average 1 MB of data and the user clicks on an average of one page/link per second you might infer that he can download 1 MB per second. This is strictly a guess. There could be lots of reasons why a person would click-through that quickly. Maybe he's been to your site before and knows his way through all the links. He could be clicking-through before the pages finish loading. But, then, the person would have had to have been at your site before. You would have had plenty of chances to "fish" for that information before.

...All supposition, on my part...

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Adam Wilbert
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 590
From: Bellingham, WA, USA
Registered: Mar 2002

posted 02-13-2005 11:27 PM

Randy,

what if, like me, your customer is surfing multiple sites at a time and it takes them an excessively long time to return to your page to click to the next. Then your site would be downsampling content for no particular reason. ??? I'm sure there is probably a way to "ping" your viewer without resorting to something as arbitrary as user response time.

I must only visit reputable web sites as I never have a problem with java/flash etc. But here are a couple of my peeves:
Sites that have alot of garbage on their sign-in page (like my bank) that takes a while to load before my browser will auto-populate the user name and password fields. I like the way Ebay does it, with a linkable login page that has minimal graphics.
Thanks to this upstanding forum, I can't visit many other "anonymous" forums wihtout cringing at all of the "hey, yo. A'ight I probly no wuz your prollem" lingo. If it wasn't for film-tech, i'd assume that everyone on the web was 9. Thats not really a design problem though, just a societal issue.
I do like when websites that I visit often have a feature to alter the color scheme. I don't know why though...

If brad is asking because there are changes in the works for F-T, I'd only ask for more graemlins. Such as MPAA ratings graemlins, for rating the joke forum and elsewhere, and a star and half-star graemlin, for movie reviews. That way instead of saying "three and a half stars!" we could begin posts with

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Mark J. Marshall
Film God

Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 02-14-2005 01:02 AM

You guys complain too much. Use Firefox, and add the "Ad Block" extension. You can right click on any advert on a page, and select "Ad Block Image", and you'll get a pop up box, where you can see where the image came from. It's usually a server like "myads.ads.com/ads/a/ss/s3mim3..." Change it to "*.ads.com/*" and click ok, and *POOF* all those ads disappear forever. Works with some flash ads too. That together with Firefox's built in popup blocker my web surfing experience practically ad free.

Other than that, as a web designer, and programmer, there is only one thing that really annoys me. Any web site that REQUIRES the client to use certain software in order to work. For example, any site that REQUIRES Internet Explorer to work, or any site that REQUIRES Java to work. There's no need at all to box yourself into a corner when you design a web site, but idiots do it all the time, and it does annoy me.

[ 02-14-2005, 10:19 AM: Message edited by: Mark J. Marshall ]

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Brian Michael Weidemann
Expert cat molester

Posts: 944
From: Costa Mesa, CA United States
Registered: Feb 2004

posted 02-14-2005 02:52 AM

One little pet peeve of mine is when sites do fancy little adjustments like changing the color of the scroll bar. Not everyone has a mouse with a scroll-wheel, and some people have to actually SEE the scroll bar without having to LOOK for it.

I have a scroll-wheel mouse now, but I don't always use it. Also, long pages that reduce the scroll button to shorter than it is wide; like many blog sites. Do we really need to see the last 100 entries on the front page?

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Scott Norwood
Film God

Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-14-2005 03:55 AM

Another one: any web site (usually of the news/"magazine" variety) which doesn't show complete articles on a single page but, instead, forces one to click through to a new page every few paragraphs. Stupid, especially if one wants to print the content for offline reading (not something that I usually do, but still annoying)!

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Mark J. Marshall
Film God

Posts: 3188
From: New Castle, DE, USA
Registered: Aug 2002

posted 02-14-2005 10:23 AM

Actually, what annoys me more than a web site that requires IE, is a salesman that shows up at my company and tries to sell us their fabulous new state of the art web based service - which was designed to work only with IE.

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Ian Price
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1714
From: Denver, CO
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-14-2005 12:53 PM

If your web site has a lot of photos to look at and you can click on a thumbnail to look a big photo, please put in a forward and back navigation buttons so that you don't have to click back to the thumbnails to look at the next photo and then the next photo opens in yet another window. I just want to click thorough the photos like turning the page in a photo album.

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Jason Burroughs
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 654
From: Allen, TX
Registered: Jun 99

posted 02-14-2005 01:07 PM

Personally, I dislike websites hijacked by the MPAA (not that I condone pirating):

Link

Though the parody page is pretty good:

Link

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