design nightmares

October, 2000.
By Molly E. Holzschlag. (Link to original article.)

It was All Hallow's Eve, and the Web designer drifted to sleep at her workstation and began to dream. She heard a strange voice from the dark beyond:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while you're coding, weak and weary
Over many a buggy and troublesome Java core,
While you debug, nearly napping, suddenly there comes a tapping,
As of something quickly rapping, rapping at the office door.

'Tis some Web visitor tapping at your portal poor. He visits once and will come again

Nevermore!

She woke with a start and found herself in a grotesque gallery of Design Nightmares, each one guaranteed to wrong her visitors and rob her clients. As she studied the horrors, she realized that if she could learn a lesson from each mistake, and never again trample upon the tenets of good design, she could return to her happy life of 14-hour days and Chinese takeout leftovers. If not, she might spend an eternity toiling in the Chambers of Never-to-Be-Approved Mock-Ups.

Join us on this Halloween journey as we follow in the footsteps of our heroine, exploring where so many designers go wrong and learning how you can avoid their scary mistakes.

architecture spooks

The bottomless pit

Navigation is like a frozen Baby Ruth bar. It's something you crave, but it's really hard to bite into. And if it's too hard, you'll chip a tooth.

Good navigation is more difficult to maintain as your Web site ages, too. The more complex Web sites become, the more pages or sections you add, the more difficult it is to create navigation schemes that make sense. You need to be careful not to toss your site visitors into a deep, dark well from which they cannot escape.

To avoid the navigation bottomless pit:

• Make sure a means back to the home page is available on every internal page.
• On complex sites, create a table of contents or a site map page, and make sure that it's highly accessible.
• Always orient your users as to where they are within a site. This can be done by ensuring that each page is properly titled and by adding a location indicator or breadcrumb trail such as About Us > Company Information > Quarterly Reports.
• Include redundant navigation mechanisms such as jump-to section menus along with backward and forward links.

Captive site visitors are much more fun when you can taunt them. To do this, you've got to keep them around a bit and let them think it's their own choice, without letting on that they're trapped in your wicked Web.

Site of the living dead

You're watching a horror flick on TV. During the commercials, you see an ad for something you really want. You write down the URL provided. You go to the site and get an error message. Your browser can't find the server or the page it's seeking.

Making the decision about where to host your sites is very important. Whether you choose an in-house option, co-location, or full-service hosting, professional sites require professional sysadmin services. If yours doesn't provide the best, seek out other sources.

You, or someone on your staff, should be responsible for testing links and updating the dead ones. Sometimes you'll miss something, but your visitors won't. So if they write about dead links, respond.

If you're moving your site, try to create a seamless forwarding method by ensuring either that your pages properly point to your new domain, or that you have the fewest possible number of hops and skips from the old site to the new one. If you're in the unlucky situation of having an old site with many pages being pointed to a different domain, try to reproduce the structure. At the very least, set up reroutes to the home page of the new location.

The portal of dorian gray

Though portal sites are basically just an aggregation of links, you can customize them to look young, vibrant, and fresh. Choose a unique color scheme and layout, and combine those with some specialty graphics and welcome messages that make your portal look terrific.

However, beauty runs only skin deep. There are some serious architectural problems with certain portals, problems that good looks can cover for only so long. The most apparent flaw is that portals offer too many options.

I set up my custom portal page and then counted the links. The total on my home page is 301. The horror! There are also four pull-down menus and two search fields. That's fine for an old Web witch like me. But what about a user who's truly new to the Web? Such a user will feel old age approaching rapidly as he or she tries to figure out how best to use a site.

When designing portals, try to offer a simple, or basic, view for those who prefer a more pristine approach to their daily bytes.

interface demons

Welcome to the (not so) fun house

As a kid, did you ever visit a fun house at a state fair or amusement park? Filled with lights, mirrors, costumed figures, and weird sound effects, it's the perfect mix of chills and thrills for an imaginative child. There were traps and tricks everywhere you turned. You left feeling energized, amazed, and sure that you got your money's worth.

But what works for in-the-flesh entertainment can fail completely on a Web site. It doesn't take much blinking and flashing to convince any site visitor that he or she wants to get off the ride. The placement of your animation could distract site visitors from the core content. If you've got audio running, you might upset that surfer who listens to Internet radio. If you're using Flash, you'll upset that surfer who didn't expect to find Flash on an information-oriented site. You have to think about your audience when designing sites. Adding a technology to a site just because you can is often a dark and dangerous road.

Balance is key. Remember how sick you got eating all your Halloween candy in a night? Don't overdo!

Pop-up poltergeists

ou know these spooky characters. These tiny windows pop up when you least expect them, and they can clutter your desktop with extraneous information and drain your computer's lifeblood during the shortest of visits.

A common pop-up problem is the inappropriate use of JavaScript windows and targeted windows. Am I saying that having a poltergeist on your site is a bad thing? Not necessarily. You just have to have a good relationship with 'em.

Here are a few poltergeist pointers:

• Use JavaScript pop-ups for demonstrations (product pictures, code samples, screen shots).
• Avoid the use of JavaScript pop-ups for ads, navigation, or core content pages.
• Target new browser windows when you are offering offsite pages as ancillary materials to your own.
• Another helpful hint to avoid inducing the words "They're ba-a-ack" with your pop-ups is to let people know that a given link will open in a pop-up or a new browser window.

content monsters

Attack of the killer blog

A blog can be thought of as a distant relative to that famous horror movie creature, the Blob. It's a gelatinous, growing critter that, despite its potential for disaster, does have certain endearing qualities.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a blog is a Web log. It's a collection of brief, regularly updated bits of content that people can add to their Web sites. Blogs are particularly helpful in keeping content up-to-date. Some businesses use password-protected blogs for company calendars and announcements. On personal pages, the blog has replaced the old-school "Welcome to My Home Page" site as a contemporary means of self-expression on the Web.

But some blogging bugaboos have begun to appear. First, blogs require regular care and feeding. If you create one, you've got to keep it nourished with new entries. Otherwise you run into the mummified content problem (see below). Some blogs suffer from the opposite problem: they ramble on forever and turn into one long page of self-indulgence.

So keep your blog a happy blog. Feed it fresh, rare meat every day. Create concise entries, or limit the number of entries on your page. Create a blog archive and avoid backblog. Your visitors will be happy you did.

Mummified content

What's that musty smell? It seems to be coming from my Web site. Could it have something to do with the fact that I haven't updated the content in a year?

Another familiar Web site horror, the mummified content scenario is all too easy to fall into. After all, we get darned busy. But letting a Web site get stale is easy to avoid. Here are a few tips:

• Consider adding a blog to your site (just be sure you replenish it regularly). Blogs make it easy to add content quickly.
• Clearly separate and mark archived content as archived content. Otherwise, people might think your version of today's news is three months old.
• If you can't keep up with a page on a site, consider chopping it off.

Of course, if you can't keep up with the site itself, you may need to do some more advanced chopping, or bury the site altogether.

usability horrors

Frankenstein's monster download

Ever get that bloated, green-around-the-gills feeling? I do, every time I visit a Web site that takes forever to load. I'm singing an ancient melody here, I realize. But even with broadband access, there's no excuse to create bloated sites.

Frankenstein's Monster would have been a lot cuter had Herr Frankenstein spent a little time choosing his content. Instead of an ungainly hulk, the creature could have been a graceful giant, sure to be more pleasing to his lovely bride.

Just because you have smokin' T1 access doesn't mean your local villagers do. So use those graphic optimization skills, streamline your tables, and test your pages at lower speeds to soothe this savage beast.

The day the web stood still

Hearing your hard drive grind to a frightening halt as your browser hits a page with a messy Java applet is a recurring Web design nightmare. Before adding an applet or complex scripting that can potentially rob your site visitors of resources, builders should ask themselves:

• Is this effect really necessary?
• Is there another way I can deliver the effect I'm after? For example, can I achieve mouseovers in JavaScript or Flash instead of using an applet?
• Always look for the most direct and simple means for achieving Web effects. And always, always think about your audience--or they may begin plotting heinous deeds against you.

Poison apple ads

Someone once told me that marketers are truly evil. When I stumble upon those deceptive ads that have fake search fields or try to blend with a site's regular content, I'm inclined to believe it.

Deception, at least in my opinion, is not the way to win the hearts of your audience. Instead of using trickery, why not try designing clever advertising campaigns that honestly showcase your wares? Your users will stick around if they know you offer trustworthy and reliable services.

In these days of hype, subtlety can be your best ally. And, like your mom always said, you'll attract more flies with honey than with vinegar.