Web Design Tips - The Five Web Page Ads That Users Can't Stand

Of course, we all want to make money on the web. Our web design clients especially.
And most users - even the ones who never click anything - understand that. In the polls we've seen of the average website visitor, most say they don't mind ads as long as they don't interfere with the browsing experience. Oh, but those others! Here's five advertising designs not to use:

1. Pop-ups - Doable with a simple Javascript 'alert' function, pop-ups are the oldest hated ad on the web. Almost obsolete since most browsers can be configured to not display them anyway.


2. Talking ads - Like the 'smiley' one you see that whistles and yells for attention. Users hate these, and they might also get fired for browsing the web at work when their web browser suddenly starts chattering and they forget they have the sound up.


3. Expanding banners - The corner kind are OK, since they are easy to recognize and don't intrude onto the main parts of the page. But when you have the flat kind that drop down over the web page like a curtain, it's irritating.


4. Floating boxes - These are the Javascript dealies that have replaced pop-ups. Browsers can't block them without turning off Javascript completely. A Javascript box that coasts in after a minute and hovers in the center of the page with no visible way to turn it off just drives the user somewhere else.


5. Misleading linked text. - This could be not-so-annoying, if only the link went somewhere that had something to do with the article. An adlink going to a swimsuit site in the middle of an article about hamsters, however, is pushing it.

Peter Brittain

Your Buzzword For The Day: UX

"UX" stands for "user experience", and a blogger over at Mashable talks about 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.

The article does cover some good ground on the whole subject of interface - whoops - experience design, and is worth a look just for the thought it provokes. I like #4: It's not "just about usability". No, it actually has to do something worthwhile, is the point that needs emphasizing.

While I agree that experience design is important, and there are designs that are better than others, I have noticed in the past few years amongst the professionals with "nebulous titles" (see #9) is that they try to hard to justify their profession and end up over-thinking the whole thing. The best intentions and all that, you know. But have you ever seen something designed by a committee? Say, a government committee? Then you know what I'm talking about.

It's good to be aware of the need to design the user experience, but at some point we also need to quit making up six-syllable words, get out of our academic ivory towers, and just say "It's a button and a menu! Leave it alone!"

Peter Brittain

An Easy Target For Ridicule

One of the favorite sports of web designers, apparently, is to point out websites with poor designs and ridicule them.

One blogger recently posted a mockery of the corporate website for McDonald's.

Ho ho ho! What a lame site!

Hold on, here. Why should a fast-food restaurant chain even care about its web image?

I mean, are you going to order a Big Mac online? Truly, many of the most famous brand names in the food industry have sub-par websites. In the case of McDonald's, they'd sell just as many Happy Meals if the Internet never existed. They already have TV, radio, and print media saturated.

Here's some other examples we found:

Burger King - No apparent marketing to customers at all. You get a very plain world map and when you navigate to a country, you get "franchise opportunities", "careers", and "management team".

Dairy Queen - A pretty showy site, with Flash animations and lots of stuff to see and do. Still you almost have to wonder "why am I here?"

Domino's Pizza - Now we're talking! At least with a restaurant that delivers to your home, their web strategy makes sense. You should try ordering a pizza online some time; you feel just like you're living in the 21st century.

Dunkin' Donuts - Not as bad as McDonald's, but still pretty blah. You could have phoned this in with DreamWeaver and an out-sourced Flash team.

Starbuck's - Only a sliver better than McDonald's site; off-putting color scheme, fixed-width, and badly organized links with bits of text here and there. Even though they're another fast-ffod type enterprise, you'd think they would try to be more appealing, since their demographic ties in so well with the laptop and smartphone crowd.

Peter Brittain
Web Designs Perth

Our Favorite CSS Showcases

For everybody who doesn't use Internet Explorer, CSS is the gift from the gods that made the web more beautiful. Galleries of CSS magic, then, basically boil down to "porn for web designers".

While your day-to-day reality will more likely involve getting a shopping cart application to check credit card numbers correctly on a client's ASP-powered site, you can always dream of a world where Microsoft is shelled into the ground and we can all use the modern, 21st-century web.

CSS Play - Stu Nicholls is nothing less than the wizard of CSS. Is there anything he can't do with it? He can draw Christmas trees, make maze games, animate sprites, create fly-out and pop-out menus, and tell you ten ways to make an interactive image gallery.

Web Designer Wall - When you land at this page, the startling design tells you right away that you're at the site of a true artist. Chock-full of inspiration.

25 Hot Female Designers - It's a common complaint that females in tech careers are sorely underrepresented, so here's a list of 25 of them and screenshots of their site. At least the design field gets to have a balanced male/female ratio!

CSS Vault - Very complete collection of CSS designs, all organized by layout.

CSS3 Preview - You'll be sick with desire when you see some of the things we could have in CSS3. For instance, how many lines of Javascript are you using to get rounded corners on your boxes? CSS3 gives you one short line.

CSS Zen Garden - We couldn't leave this out or everybody would say, "Hey, you forgot Zen Garden!" So here's the most famous of them all - a single page of XHTML which users can then customize by submitting CSS designs. The gallery has expanded over the years, so there's a lot to see now.


Peter Brittain
Slinky Web Design

Five Predictions For The Social Web for the Next Five Years

Since other bloggers are jumping on the band wagon and making predictions for 2009 (because that's what bloggers do!), I'll go one better, and also delay the time before anybody can prove me wrong: I'll predict through 2014! OK, crystal ball/ on the table/ tell all the future/ that you're able. Something's coming in...

Yahoo still won't get bought. - Did that get your attention? We spent the better part of 2008 gossiping about Yahoo and Microsoft and their expected tryst. Never happened. Microsoft is too greedy to pay through the nose and Yahoo is too full of pride to offer lower. And Yahoo is actually still more profitable than some 90% of web-based businesses. They still made $7.22 billion in 2008 and they're still a Fortune 500 company, OK?

Google will launch their own stand-alone operating system. - They kind of have that already - Android on the phone, Chrome for a web browser, Gears for widgets, Google Docs for office tools, SketchUp for a graphics editor. Put all the pieces together and make a boot-loader, that's all they have to do. Microsoft is literally shaking in its shoes at this one.

More astroturf. - "Astroturf" is where a professional hired by a corporation poses as your friend in a social site, then tries to sell you something. Worse, ten of them band together to mod you down if you have anything bad to say about their product, and up if you cheer for their product. They'll also troll and badger you to change your opinion. It's fake grassroots support, so they call it "astroturfing". Expect tons more. We already saw it online this year with the United States presidential election and candidate Ron Paul's fake support, the fake hype over movies such as "The Dark Knight" and "Iron Man", and the usual dirty tricks by big corporations everywhere. Expect to see jobs hiring professional commenters.

Sun Microsystems is going down. - Open-sourcing Solaris and Java was their last gasp. Even that hasn't helped either of these limping technologies pick up new supporters. Without Solaris and Java, Sun has some nice servers to sell, and that's it.

Twitter will get bought. - Most likely buyer: Google.

Peter Brittain

Free (or Cheap) Graphic Design Tools

Colour us "jumping to conclusions", but we'd have to guess that Photoshop is the best-known graphic design tool out there. but it's not an optimal solution for everybody - the price tag is high, it has a steep learning curve such that you could spend years studying it and not know all of it, and it's also aimed more for print graphics than web graphics.

For those of you looking for a more compact and economical solution, here's a list of tools you might want to look into. These are all less costly (all but one is free!) to download and use, and are geared more towards smaller solution sets as well.

GimpShop - As the name suggests, this is the version of the open source G.I.M.P. program geared to Photoshop users. G.I.M.P. stands for "GNU Image Manipulation Program", after the GNU.org general public license. It's about 90% feature-compatible with Photoshop, and is a much smaller, cheaper, and easier-to-learn program.

Paint.NET - This is the free graphics program using Microsoft's .NET 2.0 framework. It's come a long way since its origins as a better alternative to Windows' Paint program (the one that comes with all copies of Windows). Now it's a nice half-step between a Paint-level application and a Photoshop. Just right for slapping together a quick design.

PIXEL editor - This is the non-free one - but it's only US $32! For that price, it's barely paying for more than the bandwidth to download it. PIXEL is highly-praised by many users, citing it's vast features, light-weight system demands, and easy-to-navigate interface.

Inkscape - Another GNU-licensed free program, Inkscape produces vector graphics that are right up to par with Adobe Photoshop. Even more so than other GNU competitors, Inkscape is simple enough that a child can use it, yet can produce professional results. It's actually the one that's fun to just sit and play with!

Google's Picasa - While Picasa isn't a full-featured web graphics workshop, it is a very handy photo tool. It's geared more towards home users who want to organize and post a web photo album, with some common photo-editing tools built-in such as cropping, rotating, and colour-correction. It can still be useful for working with stock photos before posting them in your blog.

Peter Brittain
Perth Web Design

Web Geeks - Meet Your Idols!

We missed this a while back with all the pre-Holiday rush, but IT-News Australia published the list of the top ten geeks of all time. And yes, it is an article which uses the word 'geek' in the positive sense, the way we used to use the word 'hacker'.

The list is worth pursuing, because it reminds us of all the people without whom we web developers wouldn't have a job today:

• Linus Torvalds - Maybe you don't use Linux on your desktop (yet), but it is certainly on the job every time you use the Internet. After all, every time you use Google, you're using Linux.


• Sir Tim Berners-Lee - Made the World Wide Web. 'Nuff said.


• Marc Andreessen - Made the first WWW browser. Also 'nuff said.


• Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce - Invented the integrated circuit. Well, yeah, there's that.


• Richard Stallman - Together with Torvalds, has basically single-handedly kept the flame of intelligent computer use and computing freedom alive. Chances are some of your favorite tools exist under the banner of the GPL license.

There's many more who deserve mention, but I have to admit that of all the top ten lists of influential people in computing, this one is the most accurate.

Peter Brittain