Things that drive me crazy

nospam@example.com (Todd D. Esposito) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 12:26:25 -0600

There are quite a few things which make me just nuts. Three of them constantly run around my house, bickering with one another about who did what to whom first. These three, though, at least have the decency to be cute about it, most of the time. Other stuff just pisses me off without offering anything to blunt the effect. In fact, there are so many, and I have to talk about them so often, that I'm adding a categories for them to this blog.

Taking several slots on this list (mind you, this is a LONG list) is Bad Web Design. BWD takes so many forms, it needs several slots in my list. Now, I'm no designer, to be sure. And I don't pretend that I could ever do a better job than what Libor, my business partner, scrapes off his desk. I may not know much about Art, but I know what I like.

One thing I JUST HATE is a website where the designer considers me a captive audience. Libor and Steve (our emergency backup designer) are both really good at avoiding this. By allowing me, the website visitor, to do things like change the font size (using my browser controls, not something embedded on the site) and make my browser window more narrow than tall (so I can have two sites side-by-side on my screen), the designer shows that she respects the fact that she's NOT in control of my experience. I have the right, and indeed sometimes the NEED to alter my personal viewing experience of a website. If you don't make it easy to do this, then that's one Naughty Point for you. Locking me in to some goofy 450-pixel fixed-width two-column layout with a crappy pattern filling the remaining 500-odd pixels on BOTH sides of the content DOES NOT work for me. It torques me off. Why should YOU determine how much (and in what font size) I can read before I have to move my eyes to the next line?

So many designers rail against that notion. These I refer to as "dumb-ass artist-types." Note that there are "really-smart artist-types" too, but these guys aren't it. Print designers who've moved into web design, by and large, fit this mold. They're used to working in 8 1/2 by 11 form factors, with absolute control of the page layout and content. They think their design is so very slick and has such impact that we causal-not-classically-trained-non-artists cannot possibly be allowed to view it in any other way than that in which they intend. Or something Really Bad will happen. What, I have no clue, but I'm sure that Free Speech and the Expression of The Artistic Soul are all in danger if I want to be able to read that crappy site of theirs with my nose more than 2 inches from my screen.

Let's get this straight right now: graphics alone don't make a site good; layout alone doesn't make a site good. Content, alone, CAN make site good (and by "good" I mean "useful for things other than pure impressionistic pleasure"). Thus, start with good content. Graphics and Layout SUPPORT the content. They are NOT, in themselves, content. They cannot replace or supplant content. Get over it.

And lest you think I'm alone in this crusade, please read Screen Resolutions and Better User Experience from Smashing Magazine. A very good article in support of what I've been saying for years now. Unfortunately, not everybody agrees; What I find most funny about this, to be honest, is the number of comments which completely ignore what the article says and go on to postulate, with some air of authority (false) that 974.8 pixels is EXACTLY how wide a site should be. Not "really-smart" at all.

I'll be posting things that, like this, drive me crazy, but that I have to justify over and over again anyway, periodically. In an ideal world, this will help to prove my points about how stuff should be done. Time shall tell.

Opening Up - Web Design

Things that drive me crazy