Design Rant

By Cyrris

JohnDoe was showing me a prototype website design he was making for his World of WarCraft clan not too long ago. Looking over it, it reminded me of just how anal I am (and really, always have been) about certain aspects of site design. Before I go on though, I will say that despite my niggles, JohnDoe’s site looks spectacular so far, and once it comes online I may very well feel there is enough competition to make a response with a new design of my own… not necessarily for Aelon as this design is relatively new (and I like it), but I am seriously thinking about thinking of something. I’ll be damned if I’m one-upped.

The first thing that pisses me off is menu buttons (namely small CSS divs) which change colour when your mouse hovers over them… but if you click them, they do nothing. You have to click the text inside them to actually engage the hyperlink. It drives me nuts, because it’s so unintuitive. This is actually the only thing about JohnDoe’s site design that bugged me, but because his site isn’t done yet, and it’s so easy to fix, I’m sure I needn’t worry. It otherwise really does look very slick.

Next up is along the same lines. When div buttons such as the ones above are done correctly, Javascript is often employed to make the effect and the link work. But there are a few simple-minded designers out there who simply don’t bother to specify that when hovering over a Javascript menu of any kind, the hyperlinks should make the cursor change to the hand, not stay as the default pointer, or become some other strange random cursor. And for those poor designers who only test in IE, it’s not cursor:hand; in the CSS, it’s cursor:pointer, so it will work in all browsers, not just your own decrepid blue e. I’ll continue my rant regarding you people specifically further on.

Third niggle: don’t be idiots with the colour schemes. Yellow on blue is not wise. There is no point having a site if someone can’t read it for more than five minutes without getting a headache.

Speaking of headaches, horiztonal scrollbars induce them too. My resolution is 1152×864 when I’m not gaming. With Trillian docked to the side, it means my browser window when maximized is just under 1000px wide. Anandtech, I’m looking at you. You used to be 800×600-friendly. Now your site won’t fit properly in any window even a fraction thinner than 1024px. It pisses me off because I have about 1cm worth of horizontal scrolling to do, but I also have news for you - millions of people still use 800×600. So your content ought to fit in their windows. And even moreso, in mine.

We’re getting towards the worst of the worst here now. For crying out loud, make your hyperlinks stand out from normal text somehow. On my ISP’s gaming forums, they decided that inside topics, they wouldn’t bother doing that. So I no longer post links there at all - if I need to reference a site I just paste the URL straight in, so people can see they need to go somewhere to see more. It’s very unintuitive, and even a simple underline would be enough to set things right. How hard can it be.

And finally, the “designers” who make sites which work in one browser and one browser alone. Either you’re new, in which case you should be starting out with something more user-friendly, or you’ve made quite a few sites, and you really should know better.

So there we have it. Looking back over it all now, I suppose I could just as easily have stuck in a few swear words and have it put up on Pseudo’s Bastardised.net. Blinking text, disorganised tables, marquees… it’s just too much. And yet, I feel so much better now I finally have all that off my chest.