- Friday, 10 July 2009
- INQ Mobile
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One of the hallmarks of Microsoft is that we dream big - Steve 'Understatement' Ballmer
Why your website sucks
COMMENDABLE THOUGH IT BE to publish a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to ten things you should avoid in designing your website, UK Internet research outfit E-consultancy could perhaps turn some of its steely analysis skills on its own Web presence.
While we absolutely applaud the advice to cut back on the use of Flash - which in the INQ's opinion should carry the death penalty - together with such no-brainers as making sure your site loads before the visitor falls asleep, we suggest that publishing the list on a page containing no fewer than seven ads, an invitation to add a link to four blog wossnames, a subscription button, a search box, space for reader comments and no fewer than eleven top-level menu items is perhaps not the best place to publish it.
Still, there are some amusing links to tragically-bad sites. Why not wibble on over and check it out? µ
L'Inq
E-consultancy
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I thought I'd skipped a paragraph and you were taking the p1ss out of your very own site.
Wow, good cross-browser compatability! That page is broken in Opera, with the content starting past where the ads begin!
Quality!
"... a page containing no fewer than seven ads, an invitation to add a link to four blog wossnames, a subscription button, a search box, space for reader comments and no fewer than eleven top-level menu items is perhaps not the best place to publish it."

And to write a rant about that on a page that contains a few ads (sorry, can't count them due to Adblock), a search box, another search box, space for reader comments and no fewer that 23 top-level menu items is pretty appropriate, too, don't you think? :)

Joke aside, I don't believe that this is really a problem. There has to be some advertising if the website has to sustain itself, and a search box is way better than letting the reader plough through the whole damn thing just to increase page hit numbers. And a few more menu items are better than submenu after submenu after submenu.

A good example for clean, intuitive and forward navigation is www.hp.com - you can find a handful of topics which are assigned different colors and have a few subtopics, and these colors remain prominent in the child pages. It is pretty hard NOT to find the topic you are looking for there.
...how about my sitting here waiting for 45 seconds to see any INQ articles while falkag.net sits on its hands deciding if it will deign to offer me a connection, with your site coded in such a way that no content will display until the ads have loaded?

Talk about f*cking obnoxious.

And this is pretty rich coming from guys with flash interstitials that hit you going to *and* from an article.
And E-consultancy's site in Opera is just wonderful. The main body text is for some reason formatted to start vertically after the very long skyscraper of ads/links on the right hand side. So on the first page fold I get a load of ads and a big white space where the content is supposed to be!

One of the sins of web design should also be having these vertical "bars" on more than one side of the page. ONE vertical nav-bar is enough, it takes up enough space.
I completely agree with Dave... as I waited for this article to load for 30 seconds.
What everyone else said. Recently, I've been having trouble loading l'INQs to the articles in a timely fashion.
Sorry, the Inq is one of the worst designed sites on the net. You were very lucky not to be one of the examples.