My Personal Website Pet Peeves Part 1

published by Dan in Website Design with No Comments

Despite the huge number of good web designers all over the world an amazing number of website owners choose to hire web designers that come up with sub-standard websites (an understatement in many cases). It is one thing to have a website that fails to adhere to standards or that ignores usability issues that are not too obvious but it’s a completely different thing to have one that looks utterly dated and/or unprofessional.

Obviously this post was triggered by having just come across a really horribly designed site, both in terms of graphics, usability, and pretty much everything else. I wouldn’t link to the site nor even mention the name but I’m pretty sure you’ve come across one or two (probably more) sites like these. Anyway here’s a list of my web design pet peeves.

• 80s fashion – I don’t mean websites about fashion during the 80s but websites that look as “good” as 80s fashion. In internet terms this would actually be the websites spawned during the 90s. However, some really old websites, though not the slickest looking ones, do not look to horrible so I guess it really is in the “fashion sense” of the web designer or the website owner. In my opinion the web designer is still the ultimate culprit since he/she shouldn’t bend to the client’s wishes if he/she knows that the outcome would be ghastly.
• Disco fever – These are sites that use too much animated graphics from dancing smileys to flashing text and separators. An animated icon here and there isn’t too bad but if the you can see animation almost everywhere it does not only give lots of the readers a headache but also distracts them from the main content…. Unless it’s an animated graphics download site of course.

To be continued…

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