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Design dont's

List of examples of bad www site design that I regurarly encounter when surfing the web checking things for the Chipdir.

Opening a new browser window

What? Instead of jumping via a link to a new page and having that replace the content of the current browser window a new browser window is being opened for the new page.
Why? It's an (usually non-proper) attempt to make visitors come back to the site after they have followed a link. The proper way for people to come back is by using the BACK key.
Why not?
  • It's very annoying to have 20 or so windows open after surfing a while. On slow computers with little memory it may crash the browser and the OS* after a while or make the system very slow.
  • Another annoying point about it is that most browsers don't allow the BACK button to close this window again and go back to the previous window and the situation that existed there.
When allowed? Some sites don't allow their visitors to leave the site again using the BACK key, because they have installed an internal jump on their start page. See elsewhere. In these case you could use this method, but it's a shitty trick for a shitty problem. It would be better to link to the page that the other site eventually jumps to, but that may change reguraly over time, because the webmaster of that other site is obviously clueless as regards to good web site organization. It would be better to ask the webmaster to ment his ways, but he is usually clueless about reading emails as well.
What is doubly annoying? Sites that even open a new browser window when internal links are followed. Example: www.chipoutlet.com/

Using non HTML formats

What? On some sites some of the data is presented in another format like Acrobat PDF's, Word Doc's, Wordperfect Doc's etc.
Why? It's sometimes done (like in the case of datasheets in the chip industry) because these documents are already present in large quantities and hard to convert to HTML pages.
Why not? It's very unnatural that some parts of a site are in HTML and other parts are not. If there is a historical need to offer some of the data in PDF, also present the data or a summary in HTML. Some of the chip manufacturers already do a great job here, like Micron. There is almost never a need to use proprietary format's like Word and Wordperfect doc's.

Jump page

What? More and more sites perform an automatic jump from their start page to some page in a database.
Why not?
  • When it's not properly done, you can't go back via this hurdly using the BACK button and thus it makes surfing the web very annoying.
  • When people bookmark the main page of the site, they bookmark and ugly URL and not the basic one.
How to do it properly?
  • The only way to do it properly is by not doing it. (Or make it invisible to the visitor).
  • If you feel a need to do it, make sure that the first page is removed from the history file of the browser. This can for example be done in Javascript by adding in the body tag as attribute: 'onload="location.replace(\'NEW_URL\');"'. You can test it by following this link: local. (The confirmation dialog window that you'll get is just to show more clearly how it works.) Disadvantage: People need to have Javascript enabled, but most people have.
  • An alternative is to wait 5 seconds before the jump occurs, so people have a couple of seconds to use the BACK button. The HTML code for this is: '<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="5;url=NEW_URL">'. You can test it by following this link: local. (The page will wait 10 seconds before it jumps for demonstration purposes, but 5 seconds should be enough when the page is small and loads quickly. Don't put logo's and ad's on it as I did!)

Still to be worked out

About global site issues

About text style


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Page last edited on 20011016
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