Web Design

Well, I may not be a professional web designer or anything but I know what I think looks good so I am compiling a listing of personal peeves about websites.

• Marquee tags
  
• They are ugly and cause a distraction. The human eye is automatically attracted to motion. When an object is moving on a website the reader finds it hard to focus on the real content of a website. I find this a lot in advertisements. Never use the marquee tag. It should be discontinued and deleted from the rendering engines. If you simply have to make something move use javascript and place it where you want it to end up. that way you allow the user the option of disabling javascript and thus not having to watch the logo of your company scroll across the screen CONSTANTLY! If you simply must use it, though I can't think of a case when you have to do not use it around a picture. Moving text is distracting enough but a moving picture is just nasty. Plus moving pictures requires the reader's computer to re-render that picture every so often which taxes the cpu/gpu. Be environmentally friendly and don't use marquee.
• Useless information in the title bar.
• Web browsers are going away from the one window one website methodology that persisted for years. Every major browser, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, even Minimo, has tabs in it. If I see Home in a half dozen tabs how am I going to quickly find which tab I am looking for? My suggestion would be website name - page. So for example New York Times - Opinion would be a nice name for the Opinion page on the New York Times website. Reversing this would be fine too.
  
• Color Schemes
• Ok, honestly if you want people to read your site don't punish them. Keep your colors rather neutral. Use deeper, darker colors over a more neutral background. Under no circumstances should you ever use bright colors for a background. If you do you are a #F00. I'm sorry for that joke (for anyone who doesn't get it, #F00 is hex shorthand for 255,0,0 which is RED and it looks like fool). It causes eye strain to look at a bright background for any period of time. Also on CRT monitors it takes more energy to show bright colors than darker ones but if you are concerned about the environmental impact of your computer you are probably already using a LCD screen. Also for your background try to stay away from pictures. If you cannot avoid a picture make sure it tiles and looks well, there are other resolutions besides your own, and make sure that it is not busy or particularly bright. Text should also not be 'OMG Bright' instead it should be a color that contrasts enough with the background color. Try looking at a color wheel. They are usually obscenely bright but if you darken the colors a bit you should be able to come up with a decent scheme. For examples of what not to do, try checking myspace some time.
• Advertisements
• Advertisements bug the crap out of everyone. The fact of it is that without ads a lot of sites wouldn't be up. They pay hosting fees and writer's fees. How can ads be incorporated into a website without it looking bad? Try looking here to see how adds can be incorporated into a site without taking over. Yes, it is a google search. The adds are a link and a short blurb or text. Stuff I hate seeing in an ad on a website includes:
• Moving graphics - see marquee tag
• Sound - If I am listening to music and I hear some guy yelling about buying their product not only am I not going to buy the product I am going to leave the site with the ad.
• Pop-ups - There is a valid use for a pop-up. There is a valid use for a pop-up. There is a valid use for a pop-up. No, there isn't unless you are doing a web application. Just avoid them. Sometimes I suppose web servers are infected with them, just get on your hosting company to get their act together, you are paying them to host you they better get a decent firewall and virus protection that works.
• Sound
  
• Sound is a nice thing, really it is, but just because you want to listen to Mozart while browsing does not mean I do. Please, if you want to put links to music fine. If you want to embed it allow me to turn it on and off.
• Flash based websites.
• My problem with them is simple, you see that back arrow in the top of your browser? Try using that in a flash based website. Recall tabs? Useless. And maybe someone wants to bookmark your page Lisa's Blog- Tuna Fish Casserole. If it is flash based they can't. They an only bookmark the start of the flash movie and then have to navigate to the Tuna Fish page again. I don't care how good that fish is, I would go to another site. Don't get me wrong, Flash is useful for dynamic content but the whole site should never be done in Flash.

I think I have exhausted my thoughts for now. Try to listen to them and resist the urge to add 8 billion youtube videos to your page. Any pages I see doing that will instantly be relegated to the Hall of Website shame (otherwise known as myspace). One last rule of thumb, if you are 8 and designed a myspace page, please, I beg you, do not claim to know HTML. Do not claim that you can design pages, quite frankly I doubt it is even possible to make a myspace page not suck. Oh, and if you disagree with these or want to add, there is a comments link for a reason.