Son of Web Pages That Suck

Chapter 4 — Design Issues Even Martians Should Know

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NOTE: To conserve space, I use thumbnails of web sites. If you wish to see the web site in all its glory, please click on the thumbnail.

Big Picture Issue #1 — Web Design Isn't Sex

I've tried many ways to convey a simple message and sometimes I feel the message is not getting through. Maybe a sexual analogy will work. It seems Web designers are confusing the Web world with the real world. In the real world, foreplay is mandatory. You have to set the mood, you have to be gentle, and you have to entice. But in the world of the Web (at least those sites where the focus is making money or disseminating information), there's no place for foreplay. It's not necessary. It gets in the way. To put it bluntly, the Web is "Wham. Bam. Thank you Ma'am."

People don't need to be enticed or put in the mood when they visit your site. As we learned in the last chapter, they're at your site to solve a problem, and the sooner you give them what they came looking for, the better. Visitors don't need splash pages, Flash pages, Mystery Meat Navigation or whatever silliness you think will put them "in the mood." They want what they want NOW. "Give me your information. Sell me your product. Thank you, ma'am."

The Pointer Sisters once sang about wanting a partner who had a "slow hand." Can you imagine the following line about a Web site: "I want a page with a slow load"? Not really. Web design is about getting people what they want as quickly as possible in a way that they'll buy your product, your service, or contribute to your cause. (Some non-profits may be an exception- some mood setting may be necessary. You should know the difference.)

Just as we've all been told not to confuse love with sex, we should also remember not to confuse Web design with sex. Web design is about making money for the designer and, more importantly, the client.

As I've said before and will say again, there are sites where you want-not need-to create a mood or entice visitors. Typically, these are movie, music, and other types of sites where no one is going to get fired because the Web site "didn't make us any money." These sites are wonderful to work for because there is no accountability.

Designers often get confused about another aspect of Web design - "borrowing" design elements from another site. They hope they won't be held accountable for their actions. Perhaps that's because they're designing under the influence.

BIG PICTURE ISSUE #2 — DESIGNING UNDER THE INFLUENCE (DUI)

Part of the charm of the World Wide Web is that you are just a few clicks away from tens of thousands of creative individuals whose work you can see and read and draw inspiration from. Web designers are also just a few clicks away from grabbing someone’s creativity and passing it off as their own. There’s a thin line between being influenced by what you see and designing under someone’s influence.

It’s no secret that people are influenced by what they see on the Web. Back when I started surfing the Web in 1995, one of my first influences was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s HTML Beginner’s Guide.

If you look at the top-right corner of the screen, you can see from the scroll bar that this page goes on and on and on.

The designer put every current HTML element on a single page. It was as if the term “Web page” meant just that—everything had to be put on one page.

YOU KNOW THE DESIGN OF YOUR WEB SITE IS A SUCCESS WHEN PEOPLE CALL OR E-MAIL YOU TO COMPLAIN:

1. It's too easy to find what I'm looking for on your site.

2. Your site loads too quickly.

3. Your site is too easy to navigate.

4. Your site is too informative.

This is so important we have to say it again. Your goal is to design your site so visitors can complain about these four issues.

As the figure to the right demonstrates, I obviously was influenced by the look of the HTML Beginner's Guide because my page also goes on and on and on. Although I didn't have as much material as the University of Illinois, I managed to make a completely useless page-even by 1995/6 standards. "You design what you see" is a phrase I've heard through the years. If this is true, I won't tell you what influenced the first version of WebPagesThatSuck.com (See below)-no, it wasn't an S&M bondage site.

The 1996 Look of WPTS

By 1998, I was pretty fed up with all the bad design I'd seen, so I thought it would be funny to put as many sucky techniques on one page as I could. What you can't see in the figure below is the sliding blue screen that made the page even tackier than it looks here.

The 1998 Look of WPTS

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