It is safe to assume, that anyone of us knows someone who has their house cluttered with figurines, souvenirs and collectibles. A lot of times these things appear rather ugly, useless and out of date to us and we wonder why anyone would spend time and effort on them.
Funny though, that when it comes to people creating their own private web sites, or - god forbid - even their company web presence, they tend to fall into the same trap. In this article, we'll discuss some web site elements, that used to or are even to date perceived to be cool and beneficial, but in reality don't make a lot of sense.
I am not a number! I am a free man!
Sorry to quote "The Prisoner", but there is nothing more unprofessional these days than a huge big counter on web sites stating that you are the 234th visitor since 2001. If you want to know how successful your site is, analyse the server logs or use a hidden counter instead. Of what possible use could this information be for a visitor? If your site is popular, it will have ranked better in the search engines and the visitor will have found you that way. There are aspects where a popularity meter is a good indicator of the value for the visitor, for example when listing articles or downloads. Putting a number on the visitor is bad style though, and hails from an era where it was necessary to show the popularity of your web site to justify its existence.
Close this
Although debatable, popup windows are still very much in use and many a developer considers it necessary to add a "close this window" link pointing to the window.close() Javascript function on the page. Despite being only a working link when Javascript is available, it is completely redundant. Nearly every windows-based Operating system and application offers big "X" buttons and keyboard shortcuts to close them. Why should the visitor need a link to do so?
Bookmark Us
You may have encountered links or huge buttons on web sites giving the user the chance to bookmark this page or even set it as the browser homepage. This represents a rather desperate attempt to gain more popularity, and is more annoying than helpful. The browser GUIs make it rather easy for a user to add a favourite or bookmark, and it is their choice to make, so to say a small quality control of your site. If it is interesting enough, people will bookmark it, but are not very likely to use the link. One might argue that users do not know how to bookmark a web site, but how likely are these users to find the bookmark again if they hadn't used the flow their browser offers them to set it?
Print This
It is very important to offer a good printable version of long texts on the web. Reading on the screen is a lot more tiring than reading on paper, as the eyes get bombarded by light directly, rather than reflecting light of a paper. "Print this page" links that only link to the Javascript window.print() function are rather useless though, as they do the same the huge printer icon in the user's browser toolbar does. A print this page functionality on a page should do more than just print the page, it should convert links to readable links (what good is a underlined text when I don't know where it points to), and it should print the whole article, not only the current page. You can remove unwanted graphical elements via a print style sheet, but the other requirements can only be achieved via a backend script or another template. So, unless you really create a proper print version, don't bother offering links that promise more than they can keep.
I liked the menu, but the food was just not enough.
There is nothing more important to a web site than a good navigation. It takes the visitor by the hand, shows her how to find all the goodies in the site and indicates where in the whole big structure she is at the moment. All the more annoying if the menu fails to do so, or is only available in a certain environment. One of the most frequent mistakes newbie web designers do is to design the menu as a visual element rather than a representation of the site's information architecture. What good is a multi level dropdown navigation that requires neurosurgical mouse skills and fades in and out smoothly when there is one paragraph on each of the pages? The type and logic of your menu is defined by the content of the site, if there is not enough content, or if it is badly categorised, visitors are not likely to come back, no matter how flashy the navigation was. Navigation that is dependent on scripting or plug-ins without a fallback option should be avoided totally. Not only do those violate the accessibility guidelines, they can be a very frustrating experience for users who really want to see certain parts of your site but just cannot reach them. Search engine robots also show them the cold shoulder, and we don't want to block those out, do we?
Beware of the right-click
Copyright-paranoid web developers found a seemingly foolproof way to protect their products from evildoers on the web - right click prevention scripts. These Javascripts disable the right-click menus of the browser and - in the more brutal versions - show the visitor an alert box stating that all here is copyrighted. First of all, these scripts are easily hackable by turning off Javascript. Secondly, they make you appear rather arrogant and patronising. A copyright statement on the site indicates the visitor clearly that you are not a free-for-all resource, no need to neuter the visitor's browser functionality. You simply cannot protect anything you put online, as soon as it hit the screen, there is a way to reach and store it - actually that is one of the many benefits of the web. The only thing a right-click-disabling script does is hurt visitors of your site that like to use the extra functionality their browsers offer them in the context menu. For example, they might want to open a gallery link in another browser instance or tab to load the pages for viewing later while reading on, and they do that by right-clicking or shift-clicking the link. Nothing on the client side is hack-proof, if you want certain parts of your site to be only accessible to a chosen few - server security is your friend.
Look here, I am animated
The GIF (and the PNG) graphics format allows us to animate pictures, which might make sense from time to time. It does not mean however that we should clutter our web sites with animations. Animation is a very strong stimulant on the visual nerves of the visitor and can become very tiring and distracting when you spend some time on the page. Good browsers allow the user to turn them off, which is a real grace when all you want to do is read an article. GIF animations are the equivalent of leaflets you find in your daily mail - fancy, shiny advertisements. When you use them without advertising anything, they are simply a nuisance, no matter how cool they are.
Tunnel vision
When Flash came out, they appeared - the tunnels of eternal stimulation. It seemed as if any web site needed a 5minute intro with music and animation, or else it would not be "cool" and "up to date". If you were lucky, there was a tiny "skip intro" link somewhere, if not, you were along for the whole ride every time you went to the site. Flash is a great tool for rich internet application development and presentations, but it is tempting to use it badly. Tunnel pages only make sense when you want to advertise your flash skills or a certain special product, and even then those should be on a showreel page rather than forced upon the visitor every time she visits your page. Home pages with static content are another problem. What good is a "Welcome to our page" blurb every time you go to the site? The same space could be occupied by a short introduction to the site and a list of the latest changes and enhancements. The success of web sites is not only their visual appearance, it is how easy they are to handle and how much maintenance they get. A site that gives the visitor new content all the time and makes it easy to see these changes is a lot more likely to be a success than one that greets the visitor with the same welcome text it had 3 years ago.
Ice Cream Truck Web Sites
In the days of hit-and-miss web design, someone came up with the idea of using a MIDI music file playing in the background on a web-site, seeing this as a great opportunity to share musical likes with anyone visiting the site. Despite having the quality of ice cream truck music, it is pretty presumptuous to think every visitor wants to have music on the page. Later on Flash components (and even talking banners) came into fashion, with the same effect. If you are a musician, or your web site is a trailer for a movie, by all means, add music, but give the user a chance to get rid of it. Even better, allow the user to choose to play it. If you are not, why would you want to distract from your content that much? A boring text does not get better by adding music, that's like a government official singing your tax bill to you while playing on the guitar.
These are just some examples of the knick-knack web designers clutter their pages with. Maybe you considered using some of them or maybe you already do. Take a look again and think about the visitors of your site - do they benefit from them?
Continued in "More web site knick knack".
This article was originally published at Devarticles.com.