|
Software packages like Microsoft's Frontpage make building a web page a snap for virtually anyone. Thousands of new web pages appear every day. With the
proliferation of web pages on the Internet we are finding it more and more difficult to find quality pages. By quality we mean pages that both look nice graphically and have decent content. Here is our list
of "what NOT to do's" presented in a humorous and light hearted fashionIn the tradition of Jeff Foxworthy's "You might be a redneck if..." We present, Your Web Page Might Suck If...
- If your web page has a spinning globe... (If you web page has multiple spinning globes, then your page really sucks!)
- If you force your viewers to listen to cheesy MIDI music...
- If your web page is hosted on Geocities or any other "FREE" site which forces your viewers to read advertising...
- If your page uses frames... (If your page uses visible frames or frames within frames, then your page really sucks!)
- If you can't read the text because it's the same color as the background or close to it...
- If you use the <blink> tag...
- If you invite viewers to visit Microsoft or Netscape on your home page by posting a button saying "Best Viewed With"...
- If you think the more animations the better...
- If you use wildly different fonts, font sizes, and/or font colors on your page...
- If your background image hypnotizes viewers and/or induced migraines...
- If your front page is a "splash screen"...
- If you include an image map for navigation purposes but don't include text links...
- If your page requires a certain resolution or fonts to be viewed properly... (and if you require a certain gamma value for the monitor, then your page really sucks!)
- If you use keyword spamming to improve your search engine rankings, but don't take steps to make the spammed keywords invisible from within the browser...
- If your page pops up new browser windows for no good reason-- and there are very few good reasons...
- If your page uses GIFs or JPGs to display words that could be rendered just as well using ordinary text...
- If your page includes a background sound effect...
- If your page includes the latest techie gimmicks for no good reason...
- If your page is so optimized for one browser that it can't even be viewed on other browsers...
- If your page uses style sheets but is not set up to be backwards compatible with browsers that don't understand style sheets...
- If your "list of links" page consists of a single 300K page of links with no categorization and in no particular order...
- If your banner ads overwhelm the page content...
- If you use JavaScript to re-open a window after the user closes it...
- If your page proudly proclaims "All the latest news about [insert topic here]!", but hasn't been updated since 1995... (and if the page doesn't include a "last updated" field somewhere, then
your page really sucks!)
- If your page has improperly compressed JPG images thereby making them twice as big as they need to be...
- If your page takes more than 20 seconds to download at 28.8K...
- If your links page contains more broken links than active ones... (and if you know about them but don't fix them then your page really sucks!)
- If you have an image that looks like a button but isn't...
- If your page has an "under construction" graphic... (and if it's an animated one then your page really sucks!)
- If your page has irregular GIF images with a solid background that should be transparent or transparent images where the edges show...
- If your page has graphics that need to be cropped...
- If your page has a background image that doesn't tile well...
- If your page uses cutesy placeholder images...
- If your page uses free clipart found on the internet...
- If your web page uses blue underlined text for a heading, thereby creating something that looks like a link, but isn't..
- If your web page looks like Las Vegas at night...
.About the authors:
André Vatke is president of Target Media Group, Inc. and the founder of Leaders Club.
Rob Berry is the webmaster and CIS manager for
Nebulis International. |
