Another common problem with websites is they can end up being a sandpit where the person developing the pages sees everything as an opportunity to try their hand a coding a particular feature.
The sort of things that get added to websites that don’t offer any benefits to the user are:
- Little images that follow and swirl around the pointer icon around as the user moves the mouse
- Snowflakes that gently fall down in front of the text (especially when it’s mid-summer)
- Jiggly, scrolling text in the status bar of the browser
- Creating all the site using Flash
- A menu that chugs annoyingly down the page as the user scrolls down – (I mean they’d never think to look back at the top of the page where they first saw the menu…)
- MIDI music files that play something when the visitor arrives.
The list goes on an on – there’s always some new tweak that could be coded up and added to the site.
Whilst it’s great to teach yourself how to code things on a website, these “try it out for fun” features should only be worked on locally, and never uploaded to a live site, since they are little more than distractions that slow users down from doing the task they wanted to do.
Also, a lot of the dynamic HTML effects, like expanding and contracting panels, for example, tend to need quite a bit of checking to make sure they work for different browsers, which also eats up valuable time.
It’s better to use your resources to find out exactly what your visitors want from the site and develop those requirements, rather than adding distracting “sizzle” features.
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Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting