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Dick Gaughan's Website This page: http://www.dickalba.demon.co.uk/design/rant.htm |
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"You must have Javascript enabled to view this site ..." "This site requires a frames-enabled browser ... " "Best viewed with Internet Explorer 5 at 1024x768 resolution ... " Or sometimes it's just text and graphics running off to the right side of the screen so you can't read it without irritating scrolling back and forth for every line. Or sometimes you wait a long while for the page to load and are then left sitting looking at a blank screen. The original concept behind the World Wide Web was as a means of linking together information resources so that, for the first time in human history it would be possible to have all information available to all people regardless of geographic location and to make it a simple matter to cross-reference this information to enable easy access. Content was paramount, indeed content was the very reason for the invention of the WWW in the first place. A couple of years later, some smart person decided that the WWW could be used, not to exchange information, but to make money through reducing it to yet another marketing tool. As they were not exchanging information, presentation became paramount. Another victory of style over content. Having no content whatever, they began to demand ever more visual gimmicks and slick marketing tricks and there were those only too happy to get a slice of the action by providing them. When those who wished the WWW to maintain the altruistic open-door philosophy of Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the WWW) complained about the damage being done by this shortsighted "Profit is God" rush to exploit whatever the cost to others, we were sneered at and told that the WWW was merely another market and that we were obstructing progress. This from people who didn't know the difference between HTTP and an elephant's anus. They said the same about the Amazon rainforests. Within a couple of years, the WWW was flooded with sites which had nothing more to say than "Give me your money". The mass marketing of "do it all without having to learn any of that boring HTML stuff" toys such as MS Front Page has meant an increase in bloated, broken, oversized, badly-constructed websites which demand you use a particular piece of gadgetry, for example, the latest version of MS Internet Explorer, before you can see them. These are fine if they are simply your own self-built personal homepages put together for fun, filled with pictures of your hamster, and you're not too bothered about who visits it. But for a professional musician who is hoping to use the web to promote themselves and their work, it can be disastrous. If someone is interested in purchasing your latest recording, or looking for gig information so they can come and pay to hear you, and they arrive at your site only to find that they are denied access to the information there because the system they're using doesn't support all the nonstandard whizz-bang gimmicks the designer is playing with, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what their reaction is going to be. And, when that annoyance is aggravated by a sign telling them that they can only have that information if they install a different browser, they're likely to think, "Hang on - I am spending my time and my money visiting your site -- and you're telling me I have to change my setup before I can get information which will allow me to spend even more of my time and money on you?" Let's put it another way --
"I got your latest CD but it sounds dreadful" That sound like a reasonable way to keep them coming back? Rhetorical question -- why do you expect people to go to all the trouble of exchanging the browser they use and feel comfortable with, not to obtain some really useful information which will enrich their lives, but simply to read your latest tour schedule or see a review of your latest CD?
A badly designed website is not insignificant, it is something which can do you a
great deal of professional harm. Quote from a web design newsgroup : |
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"Remember that some people have no choice as to which browser they use (they have
to use what's provided by their company, or the only one that's available for
their OS), and others have a strong aversion to one (or both) of the big-name
browsers; so using browser-specific HTML is probably the number 1 dumb idea in
Web-page design. If you have to do it, don't do so on your index page, and
provide a parallel generic version of your pages." |
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Sites which exclude people not using a particular software or hardware
configuration are, quite frankly, a self-indulgent pain in the posterior; they ignore
the reason why the web was developed in the first place and threaten its future
development and ultimately its very existance. Their designers really need to give a
thought to why they are designing the site - to impress themselves and each other with
their cleverness or for the benefit of their clients and their visitors.
For example, the most wonderful array of multicoloured graphic links is of absolutely no use to someone who is blind or seriously visually impaired unless you provide text alternatives for their speech synthesiser. Designing websites is an entirely different beast from any other kind of design. Having a good eye for colour and layout can equip you to design fine sites -- after you've learned the basic techniques of web construction and these are closer to engineering than artistic skills. The point which too many overlook is that HTML is not a design language - it is a markup language - and the basic starting point in building a website is not design, it is construction. Layout, colour, balance, text formatting -- these are all subjective and a matter of taste, but basic construction is not. Either your site works or it doesn't. And if it only works on particular configurations, then it doesn't work. Period. To be cruelly blunt, the biggest menace on the WWW are those people who have some knowledge of graphic design and who imagine that the principles and techniques they have learned are applicable on the web and that they therefore have nothing to learn. Not all people with design knowledge are like this, but a good many are. Believing they know all there is to know, they make no effort to learn how the web actually works, how files are requested and transferred from site to site, what the accepted standards and protocols are, how the various browsers differ in their rendering of pages. Knowing nothing of this new environment, they arrogantly insist on trying to impose the rules of another, alien environment, the errors of which the web was designed to avoid in the first place.
Ignorant of basic principles, they ridicule those with knowledge. They obtain a copy of some piece of bloatware like Front Page which, apart from building documents many times as large, and therefore many times slower to load, than necessary, embeds all kinds of non-standard codes which can only be rendered by Internet Explorer with scripting enabled on a screen resolution of 1024x768 and which will make their pages unreadable to everyone else. The statement, "If my site doesn't work on the browser you're using then you should get another one" is the clearest possible indication that you are listening to someone who is so ignorant of the basics that they don't even know enough to know how ignorant they are. It is a contemptuous statement used exclusively by the clueless and those too lazy or arrogant to take the trouble to design their pages properly. And when it is used by someone who lays claim to the title "web designer" and offers to build your site cheaper than everyone else then it is a clear sign that you are being asked to donate your hard-earned money to someone who, far from knowing what they're doing, is actually in seriously urgent need of going and buying a copy of "HTML for Dummies". Caveat emptor. When it comes to paying someone for web design, the old cliche holds absolutely true -- "Good, cheap, fast. Which two would you like?" The main skill of design is to make something look good. The main skill of website design is to make it look good regardless of the setup being used by the person viewing it. So, what the statement, "In order to view this site you must be using ...", really means is, "Access to this site is restricted by the inability or arrogant refusal of the designer to figure out how to make it display properly on anything other than their chosen configuration". Read that last paragraph again. And it also means that they regard their design as being far more important than the information that website design is supposed to make easily accessible. Here's a simple example. The two most popular browsers, Netscape and MSIE, have significant differences in the way they display pages. So a page which looks delightful using MSIE may well look appalling in Netscape. The clueless way of dealing with this is to put a "Best viewed with MSIE" label on the site. The correct way of dealing with it is to design the page so it is readable in both. There is simply no excuse for not doing this. Don't misunderstand me -- I'm not saying don't use scripting languages or frames or nice graphic layouts. I'm saying that if you do, be sure they're being used for a good reason and that you provide an alternative. If you really must use Javascript or frames, then use <NOSCRIPT> and <NOFRAMES>, and use them for the purpose for which they were created -- not to tell the visitor to get a new browser, but to direct them to an alternative version of your page which will work with the one they already have. And if you use graphics as links to other pages, provide text alternatives for people with visual disabilities. HTML provides a nice little element within graphics tags for doing this - the "ALT" tag. Use it. Yes, it's hard work providing pages which will work on any setup but it is a basic skill of building websites and not to do it simply marks you out as a poor designer who doesn't care about the visitor. So, if you want people to use your site (and why else would you have a site in the first place?) then make sure it's designed so that it's accessible to them. ALL of them. Not just the ones with perfect sight using Javascript and frames enabled Internet Explorer on a Windows PC with a 17" monitor. If it isn't, then it's costing you goodwill, visitors and, ultimately, money and you really need to rethink what your site is for and whether whatever benefit you feel comes from your 'kewl' tricky stuff is really worth the price of excluding many people from actually seeing your site at all. |
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World Wide Web Consortium The WWW Consortium (WC3) is the body which sets the official standards for HTML .
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HTML version 4.0 The current set of standards Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design
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Web Accessibility Initiative "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." -- Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web |
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Comments to: gaelweb@dickalba.demon.co.uk
