Web Design is a road…

Crys — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:33:05 +0000

Here I am again, stuck in IE7 hell. It struck me today, while I’m sitting here hacking up my layout’s css to accommodate the vagaries of IE7, that working on a layout is a lot like driving a car. There’s a lot of things you have to learn first to keep yourself from being a hazard to other drivers, but once you get the hang of it, those things all become second nature.

Designing for the better browsers, Firefox, Safari, etc., is like driving down a mostly deserted highway in Wyoming. Fast, smooth, straight-forward, easy to find yourself doing 100mph with the radio blasting while the scenery around you flies by (not that I’d know anything about doing that *shifty look*).

Most of the time, IE8 is the same. You may occasionally have to change lanes or slow down a little, but it’s easy to see those problems coming and just build in solutions from the start.

Now imagine you are asked to plot a route across the country that involves no highways, no stop lights and no stop signs. You have one hour to plot this route. Then you must drive it. From memory.

That’s what working with Internet Explorer 7 is like.

Yes, it’s pretty but it’s not a great web presence

Crys — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:55:25 +0000

There are a few things you will never get if I work on your website. I promise that you will not have a flash-only website that forces the browser to be the same size as the screen (if I wanted it that big I would have made the browser that big, thanks) and play loud music you can’t turn off with canned sound effects when you move your mouse. No hidden navigation that users have to “discover”. No flash-only “I didn’t want search engines to be able to index my site anyway” crap.

Yes, some of those sites are pretty. Very well executed, very artistic. Props to the artists involved. But a web presence it is NOT. Users should be able to tell at a second’s notice what they’re supposed to do on the site, how to get where they want to go and most importantly, what you do. Search engines need text, TEXT, for their spiders to index or you can kiss any kind of placement in search results goodbye. And finally, stop ticking your users off! If I want sound, give me a button that says “turn sound on”, don’t start playing it immediately. Stop resizing my browser. Stop playing movies and flash immediately on page load. Give me a button that says “Play Movie”.

This is not rocket science. Don’t screw with your user; don’t lock out every search engine on the planet.

Crystal's Adventures in Webdev Land » rant

Web Design is a road…

Yes, it’s pretty but it’s not a great web presence