Stray Hawkeye

Admittedly, this site doesn’t even follow all of them (I keep meaning to do a redesign, but I barely get enough time to make regular posts, as you may have noticed), but a few thoughts on things that make good websites:

• If there is a navigation tree, it should have 3-7 items at each level, no more, no less.  Nine may be allowable at the highest level, but is never actually necessary.
• No one tool / website / page / area should do more than one thing.
• One thing is defined as something you can explain in one sentence without a conjunction.
• Never try to impress your users with how complicated something is – they will not be impressed, they will leave.
• Give the eye room to breath.
• Be consistent everywhere.
• Once your user has seen the home page, no other page or behavior should surprise them.
• You are not all things to all people, your site can’t be either.
• Never, ever, ever build anything in flash.
• Blinking things distract people and we are all already too distracted the way it is – never make anything blink.

“We’re All Gonna Die” by Simon Hoegsberg (I have no idea how to make the oh in his last name an empty set symbol) is a stitched together panorama of pictures he took of people walking across a bridge.  It’s sort of cool because:

• It’s the only time I can think of where I’ve seen a really wide horizontal scrolling web page that actually seemed like a good design choice.
• The huge variety of people and dress.
• The varying degrees of recognition on the part of the subjects of the fact they were being photographed.

Admittedly, I tottally don’t get the title though.

So, I feel bad pointing out errors in web design publicly, because I completely realize how hard it is to get it right across all browsers, and operating systems, and all their different quirks.  This site admittedly has its bugs from time to time as I mess with it (just fixed one (I think) that’s been bugging me forever with IE where it says “to here” under the date on each post), and I’ve worked on plenty of sites at work that have had far larger issues.  However, for a really, really little spacing issue, that happens to line up just so, this one made me laugh, so I thought in good humor, I’d share it.

I was reading about the new Lyndale Tap House on Because Emily Says So, and it sounds absolutely delicious.  So, I clicked through to their website to see where exactly it is, so I can go some time.  And, on my particular computer, with my OS and web browser, and, in particular, whatever fonts I happen to have installed on my machine, the home page looks like this:

Welcome to the Lyndale Tap Ho

It looks fine in IE on Windows (the title is notably more narrow), in Firefox on Windows it’s wider but still okay, but in Firefox on Linux, well, I’m not sure that’s the image they’re going for, though sort of a nice overlay effect none the less.  And I really like the cow in the bottom corner.

I hate websites made in flash.

You can’t link to it.

You can’t really direct people to what you’re talking about.

You can’t make small excerpts to show your readers that it’s actually worth their time to visit.

You can’t bookmark the parts you really like and find them later.

They use a different control structure so they’re harder to use (link aren’t blue and underlined, things generally don’t behave the way you’d expect), showing, in my opinion, that the people who use flash see themselves as more important than their readers/users – i.e. my way is better than what you’ve learned.

It’s not supported on nearly as many platforms, which limits its audience (Flash is one of the few things that still doesn’t work very well on Linux).

It’s a proprietary technology, though that’s a rant for another day.

Search engines can’t search it, which makes it even harder to find it.

Artists and designers are generally the most guilty of using flash for website design, because it does give a very custom feel.  Generally, when I open a site and see that it’s flash, I close it immediately.  There’s a lot of great artists and designers out there that I’d love to share, but won’t because they make it too hard to link to their work.  A lot of great content doesn’t get spread because of a really simple unfortunate design choice.

About the only place where flash is an appropriate design choice: games.  The end.  Nothing that’s not a game should use flash.  Ever.