Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Simple guide to designing pleasant web sites

When is it ok to...

Use infinite scrolling pagesnever
Steal the "/" key for your search widgetnever
Have a "website app" instead of a good web sitenever
Break functionality on the site to drive app usagenever
Autoplay audionever
Use 500 megs of ram for a web IRC (or equivalent)never
Use 100% CPU for animations you can't disablenever
Use 100% CPU for animations you can disablenever
Provide important information only as PDFnever
Have layouts with more pixels for chrome than contentnever
Run a news aggregator site that opens all links in new windowsnever
Block main page from showing until all ad trackers are loadednever
Autoplay video clipsonly if you are Vimeo, Youtube or a similar site

2 comments:

  1. Addendum:
    Stealing the "Home" key to make it scroll to the top of the page even when a text input has focus: Never.

    Claiming that the above is acceptable because "our site is not designed for keyboard navigation": Ironic and an obvious contradiction - if it overrides the operating systems default keyboard behaviour, then clearly it IS designed for keyboard navigation.

    Barclays bank... I'm looking at you...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'd like to add hijacking alt/cmd-left for whatever internal navigation the site has.

    ReplyDelete