Web designing tricks that suck!

Even though I'm not a designer and I probably can't create a good design myself, yet after years of internet surfing and visiting thousands of websites and blogs I have formed a rather strong opinion of what I believe is a good web design and what I believe is not. Over these years, I have come across an enormous number of websites that employ annoying tricks, either knowingly or unknowingly. If you own a blog or a website, make sure you don't apply these for it could very well drive away visitors from your site. Remember that these are my opinions and I don't expect everybody to agree with me.

1. Dark background: Let me get to this first because I really hate blogs with a dark backround. True, there are several nice dark templates available but readability should be your primary concern. Nothing is as readable, clear and pleasing to the eye as dark text on a white background. To make matter worse, some blogs and websites use dark font colors or very weak fonts over another dark background making it impossible to read without developing a headache. If you must use a dark background use a slightly large sized font and color it pure white. Don't make your blog look like this one.



2. Flash entry pages: One of the things that is being grossly overdone nowadays is the use of Flash. Some sites use Flash right on the home page and the only way to enter the site is by clicking links embedded inside the flash file. Do you know what I do with such sites? I close the browser window. I never surf with flash enabled and I hate it when a site forces me to use it. I usually move away from the site. Why should you need to have Flash as your entry page when you can do the same using images and texts? Flash should be limited to videos and occassional slide shows and nothing else.

3. Embedded videos: Never embed videos into your blogs and websites. Allow visitors to download the video into their hard disk. If the video is hosted on a popular video sharing site like YouTube, then just give the link to the video. I don't like videos loading and playing by itself that I don't want to watch. And once the video starts loading there is usually no way to stop it other then disconnecting the internet connection. Videos are a large bandwidth hog and bandwidth is expensive. Please go easy on your visitors.

4. Too many images: The use of images on a site should be limited. Don't use images where you can use texts. Search engines indexes a site through texts and not images. The more text you have the better are the chances of a visitor finding you through a search engine. Beautiful websites and pretty effects can be achieved by using CSS too. Web Empress has a nice article here on the correct use of images.

5. Too lengthy pages: Web pages shouldn't take an eternity to download. Visitors do not like to scroll through a 20 meter page. Break down the pages into suitable length so that it loads easier and quicker.

6. Tab stealing focus: Sometimes you open a page in a background tab and while it is loading, you continue to read the page you were originally reading before you opened that page. Suddenly the new page pops up before you. Or say you are typing on an online form or forum and then you find that you are not, because the focus has changed to a new page. Such aggressive techniques of drawing attention are a big annoyance for the visitors and should be avoided.

So there, I just told you what annoys me (and probably many others) the most. If you feel I'm wrong and that you have better opinions, then I request you to leave your comments here and educate the rest of us.