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Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

webpagesthatsuck.com

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Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#21

Post by hiphopyo »

About the Flash thing though. While there's a lot of sucky .swf files out there, Flash itself is probably the best web design tool out there.

Super intuitive and minimalist UI. Whether you need smooth lines and shapes or grid-snapped pixel graphics -- everything is always in vector until you export it to PNG. By combining its layers with its timeline, you get a sort of 3-dimensional layering system which boosts your productivity by a long shot. Then there's the whole animations / ActionScript universe if you're feeling frisky. The perfect design tool. I'm so glad Adobe bought it from Macromedia.

Like they say: "Flash for graphics, Photoshop for photos, Illustrator for fine arts, and Fireworks for kids."

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#22

Post by franze »

hmm, hmmm i would add somewhere in the list:

not caring about webperformance.

i would put it before nr. 3.

if the contrast of a site is shit, well that sucks. if your site does not show up in time, it's broken. and with "in time" i mean 700ms start render on desktop. a site with a start render > 1.4s is completely and utterly broken, you can have great webdesign, but people won't see it, because they will not use your site anyway.

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#23

Post by tim333 »

adventured wrote: post #14
toddmorey wrote: post #4

"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly." I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar. I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out ac…

This made me think of Wikipedia. Some of their topics have incredibly long pages. It's clearly very poor advice as a blanket statement. Wikipedia would be a much worse site if they made you navigate page-to-page for each section about a topic.

Hacker News too.

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#26

Post by Gracana »

kyberias wrote: post #17

I think this particular site (Hacker News) is really bad when considering contrast. Just look at this comment after a while.

Contrast issues are definitely my biggest pet peeve. I can't believe so many designers aren't concerned that their content is unreadable. If you want to hide it, maybe it shouldn't be there in the first place. If you're not trying to hide it, then why is it so damn hard to read?

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#27

Post by arrrg »

lgieron wrote: post #15
toddmorey wrote: post #4

"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly." I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar. I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out ac…

I personally hate such design - what's the point of having a 24" monitor when the web page looks like it's optimized for mobile/tablet anyway?

Why would you say that?

That website is firmly optimised for large screens, certainly not phones. It’s not even a little bit responsive. And it still manages to have too long line-lengths (though I do like it’s hierarchy and use of white space).

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#28

Post by alecdbrooks »

tericho wrote: post #5

Some reasonable points here but overall it feels like I'm reading tips (with examples) from 2005. The final point about JS made me cringe... "My home page goes from 31,803 bytes to 71,488 because of the JavaScript I've added to track visitors to my page and what they do. " Using bytes to make it sound extreme is just silly. 70KB is hardly relevant today.

Former YouTube developer Chris Zacharias has an informative story of the effect of reducing the page size from 1200 KB to 98:

>When we plotted the data geographically and compared it to our total numbers broken out by region, there was a disproportionate increase in traffic from places like Southeast Asia, South America, Africa, and even remote regions of Siberia... Large numbers of people who were previously unable to use YouTube before were suddenly able to.

Granted, that's a bigger leap than the one that made you cringe, but if it takes 2 minutes to load the new version in these areas (the number Zacharias gives), cutting 40 KB saves them 30 seconds.

The full article: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters.

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#29

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

tericho wrote: post #5

Some reasonable points here but overall it feels like I'm reading tips (with examples) from 2005. The final point about JS made me cringe... "My home page goes from 31,803 bytes to 71,488 because of the JavaScript I've added to track visitors to my page and what they do. " Using bytes to make it sound extreme is just silly. 70KB is hardly relevant today.

You're forgetting latency. Speed of light isn't getting any faster.

With all the round trips that TCP/IP makes, and the congestion control and TCP slow start (especially if your connection occasionally drops packets, which often happens on mobile / wireless connections), surprisingly little additional data can add a surprisingly long delay. Especially considering the multiple round-trips to third-party servers often required by JS libraries.

Re: Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015

#30

Post by clarry »

thomasfl wrote: post #8
toddmorey wrote: post #4

"A long web page means you have failed to organize your site properly." I think this is outdated. Longer homepages—ones that scroll down and appropriately present the content with good flow, organization, and spacing—are just fine. The Docker homepage[1], for example, is not afraid of the scroll bar. I only bring this up because I think the opposite idea of trying to cram everything above the fold or spread it out ac…

I totally agree. Long homepages is a good example of how much what is considered good web design has changed since 1994. I remember making lots of micro-pages, submenus and subsubmenus for even the smallest sites, to avoid scrolling on small 15" CRT screens in 1995. JavaScript was considered really bad practice until Gmail was launched in 2005 and jQuery in 2006. So there was no dropdown menus, unless you used applet…

You don't need JS or applets for dropdowns.
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