:web design/

Little extras

What do you include in your Web page(s)? Your content, obviously — information, promotional material, amusing stuff; whatever you are using your site for. Depending on the site and your own views on such matters, there will probably be some presentational elements (graphics, tables) and navigational aids (search facilities) to support your content. But what about the other stuff you see on Web sites? This week I’m going to quickly look at some non-content stuff which you might find yourself considering.

  1. Forms
    In some sites, of course, forms are not an optional extra — try getting people to order stuff online without one! On other sites, though, there is not necessarily an obvious requirement for one. If you have constructed a site to describe, for example, the history of the castles of Glasgow — effectively a small book on the Net — you may wonder if you need a form; after all, you have included a mailto: hyperlink. The point which must be borne in mind is that not everyone surfing the Net is doing so from a location where they have access to e-mail. Even if they have some sort of webmail account, clicking on the link won’t bring up their web mail. On the other hand, if you include a basic form with fields for name, e-mail address and message anyone accessing your site from, say, an Internet café where they don’t have e-mail can easily send you a message while it is fresh in their mind.
  2. Forums
    Forums are definitely not necessary for all sites, but in some they can be be very useful — particularly if one of the functions of the site is to foster discussion. There are free tools for sites, including forums, from various sources such as Vantagenet; large commercial sites, obviously, would want to run their own. If you have a forum, though, it should be for discussion, not a collection of “Hello” and “Oh, hello to you too” messages — that doesn’t leave a good impression on visitors.
  3. Counters
    Unless you absolutely don’t care who is visiting your site and in what numbers, counters are very useful. For instance, looking at the results for this site is suggesting that the time to stop supporting non-CSS compliant browsers is getting closer. On the other hand, it isn’t necessarily a good idea to let everyone see your counter. As with the item on Graham Norton’s show when he visited a home page whose counter stated the site had had 0000057 visitors, it can simply be a way of advertising how few visitors your site has. Even if the figure is high (legitimately or artificially) — so what? Users don’t decide to stay on a site because other people have, they stick around if it is interesting or useful. The counter doesn’t figure in that assessment. Besides, it’s so 20th Century.
  4. Banners
    Ugh! Banners are loathed by everyone, except advertising “experts” who talk about nothing but techniques to increase the click-through rate. Everybody has clicked on banners at some point (when you first start surfing the Net, you don’t know what they are) and been taken to a site of no interest whatever, perhaps not even related to what the banner said. And you did what everyone does — you hit the back button. That is probably the last time you clicked on a banner until you encountered a particularly odious technique: making the banner mimic a system alert (“Your Internet connection is not running at its optimal speed” or some such rubbish — users of non-Wintel boxes are at a real advantage here). This is even more infuriating than getting dumped somewhere you don’t want to be after clicking an obvious banner. Back button time again, and you are now wise to that trick. You may say that Web sites have to pay, and banner ads are one way to get money out of a site. Think about this, though: users loathe banners, particularly banners which con them by mimicking system alerts; this rubs off on the host site. Users very quickly get accustomed to banners and ignore them. Even if no one had done research to demonstrate this, it would be obvious — the fact that there are banners mimicking system alerts means click-through rates are plummetting, and so is revenue from banners.
  5. “Banneroids”
    Banners are universally loathed — so it is pretty stupid to design elements of your page in such a way that they look like banners. Unbelievably, I have seen several sites which do this. One of them used a graphic which was precisely the size and shape of the average banner as an article’s header. As a result, I spent the first few minutes of reading the article wondering what the hell the guy was talking about. I only realised that the “banner” was in fact the title of the article after I had finished it. Even worse, I completely missed a huge chunk of another site at first because the link to that part of the site looked like a banner — it was even animated. Of course I assumed it was a banner, and I ignored it.
  6. Alerts
    It is easy to generate an alert box using JavaScript: the box can have text and an “OK” button, “OK” and “Cancel” buttons, or a form field and an “OK” button. I’ve seen various uses of alerts, only one of which is justified.
    1. Getting the user’s name. Some sites put up an alert asking the user to enter his or her name. Hitting “OK” brings up a second alert with a personalised welcome message. In some cases, if no name is entered this is replaced with a rude message. I’ve said before that you don’t need to welcome people to your site — why else is it on the Web if visitors are unwelcome? Forcing users to go through a couple of alerts before they can do anything else at the site is enormously irritating and won’t win you any friends.
    2. Making the user agree to something. I have seen a photographer’s site which used an alert to get users to agree to respecting his copyright. This is understandable, if naïve: if people want to steal his work, this won’t stop them. Still, one has sympathy with the photographer; this isn’t the case with a particularly foul technique used by some Christian Fundy sites. Before getting into the site, or sometimes a part of the site, the user has to click “OK” to some Bible text or a statement such as “I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and saviour.” It would take a particularly meagre intellect to imagine that hitting “OK” to such a statement means anything; it is also amusing that the culprits do not seem to realise that all it takes is disabling JavaScript and reloading the page to navigate the site without being troubled by their aggressive cyberpiety.
    3. Interfering with the user interface. It may be possible, depending on the user’s browser and its configuration, to disable the contextual menu (usually accessed by the right mouse button). Assuming JavaScript is enabled, of course. The impetus for this is usually the desire to protect copyright of an image — I have yet to see this used where the image was one worth stealing, I must say — so that when the user presses the menu button they don’t get a contextual menu, but they do get a message, sometimes quite a rude one, stating that the image(s) on the site are copyright; some of the messages pretty much call anyone trying to access their browser’s contextual menu — part of their browser’s user interface — a thief. Now that’s a pretty damn stupid thing to do. Even if all you want to do is get people to read your writing or look at your images, do you think they will be kindly disposed to whatever you’re trying to say or sell if you’ve just called them a thief? However, even if you don’t actually say something like “Stop! You can’t steal my pictures!”, it is still a stupid — a very stupid… no, a completely fucking imbecilic thing to do (and I’m still putting it mildly), for the following reasons:
      1. It doesn’t work! All the user has to do is disable JavaScript and there’s the contextual menu available again, and they can save your images as they like.
      2. Even if JavaScript is enabled it still doesn’t work! Even ignoring the fact that some browsers give users great control over what JavaScript is permitted to do — so that form validation, say, might be permitted but opening pop-ups and interfering with the contextual menu are not — if the user can see your picture, it’s because it has been downloaded. It’s already on the user’s hard drive. If they want to grab your image, all they have to do is find it in the browser’s cache. (One reason why the technique used on some sites of overlaying a transparent GIF on the picture doesn’t work either.) That could take all of, oh, forty-five seconds. If the user’s being a bit sluggish. If a picture is available on the Web, it’s there to be downloaded — there is no other way for anyone to see it. That doesn’t mean copyright doesn’t apply or that the copyright owner cannot pursue any copyright infringers they learn about, of course; but the only way to prevent people from downloading your artistic gems is not to put them on the Web in the first place.
      3. Just because the only thing you can imagine the contextual menu being used for is stealing your works of art doesn’t mean that is, in fact, what the user is doing. For example, I might use the contextual menu to decide whether to open a link in a new window or a new tab; or to access extensions which, say, generate a TinyURL for the current URL, or to copy the current URL and the page’s title to the clipboard, or to open the page in MSIE, which is sometimes useful when developing a site. This functuality is there for my needs and you have no damn business attempting to impair it because of your paranoia over your pretty pictures.
      4.
    4. Farewell messages. It is possible to fire an alert when the user leaves the site. This may be a friendly “Goodbye, thanks for visiting” or a rude “Hey! Why are you leaving?” (the worst cases also prevent the user leaving, dumping them back in the page they are trying to leave). If the user has decided to go elsewhere, shut up and let them go. Doing anything which impedes their leaving the site, whether polite or rude, will ensure that their last impressions of your site are deeply unfavourable. Do you want that?
    5. Validation feedback. There are other ways of doing it, but there is some justification for using an alert to tell a user about mistakes they have made in completing a form. It is easy to leave a user in the position of having to take three or four attempts to complete a form because it isn’t clear where the error is, or which fields must be completed.
      [NOTE: It’s worth mentioning here that you should think very carefully about which fields you require to be completed, and what format you expect the data to have. For example, many forms seem to expect an address which takes the form “Jane Smith, 1 Some Street, Inatown, PC1 1NO”. The problem is that many people have an address such as “Jane Smith, Flat 3, 1 Some Street” or “Jane Smith, 1/2, 1 Some Street” or “Jane Smith, 1/R, 1 Some Street” — or even “Jane Smith, Tranquil Repose, Other Road”; inability to enter the correct address may mean that Jane Smith can’t get the goods she wants — so she is likely to go somewhere that will take her actual address.]
  7. Awards. Some sites display little awards (actually, sometimes not so little) the site has won. I seriously doubt if these actually affect how a user assesses a site. Internet users tend to be goal-orientated, surfing the Net with a purpose in mind and ignoring anythng irrelevant. Awards are good for the ego of the owner or designer, but of little interest to anyone else. If you want to put awards you have got on your site, that is up to you, although you should be wary of anything which makes your site look cluttered. Definitely avoid a technique I have seen where each award is put in a separate pop-up window.
  8. “Plaques.” This is my nickname for the little images on some sites which serve various functions: advertising a favoured product, promoting a viewpoint, proclaiming membership of an association. Let’s look at some of these.
    1. Membership of Associations: An example would be the stylish graphic used to state that the designer is a member of the HTML Writers Guild. Now, I have absolutely nothing against the HTML Writers Guild, but the problem is that putting this plaque on a page does tend to give the impression that the site’s design has been in some way endorsed by the HTML Writers Guild — which, of course, it hasn’t. Nor is the HWG a standards-setting body; it’s a bit like a doctor putting up a sign saying, “A member of the BMA.” There may be good reasons for the existence of the BMA, it may or may not do a good job, but membership of it says nothing at all about the competence of the doctor. On the other hand, a certificate stating that the doctor is a Member of the Royal College of Physicians, for example, does say something about the standard he or she has reached. Unfortunately there is no equivalent to this sort of thing in the Web design world. Unless, that is, you use a plaque to…
    2. Indicate standards compliance: The W3C offers a validation service for different aspects of Web design, including HTML and CSS. There is more to designing pages than complying with standards, but standards are important. If your page passes the W3C’s validator(s) you can put a little graphic on your page to say so. Whether you should or not is another matter. There is a strong school of opinion which says this is usually irrelevant and shouldn’t be used unless it is relevant: if you are a web designer, then, putting one on your web design pages is OK, putting it on a site for a local nursery isn’t. Against that, you could legitimately argue that any web page you design is an advertisement for your abilities, so it is fair to use them to promote your abilities. Another point is that many people putting pages on the Web seem blithely unaware that there are any rules to follow in marking up pages; maybe using the W3C plaques will help disseminate the concept of well-formed markup. I have no strong views either way on this.
    3. Free advertising. Like anyone else, web authors have views and some of them put little “plaques” on their pages to advocate use of an operating system or other software they happen to like. This is basically what the many sites which say “Best viewed with Internet Explorer” and providing a graphic link to Microsoft are doing. This is a bad thing to do. However, many advocate their favourite OS or browser slightly more subtly — “Made with Macintosh”, “Made with Linux”, “Make iCab Smile”, etc. Whether or not this is appropriate depends on the site. On a personal site, it’s fine; the whole point of a personal site is that it is a forum for personal opinions. On a small commercial site it is more questionable, since some people do get miffed at even the most gentle advocacy of an alternative choice of software or hardware. On a big commercial site, it is as inappropriate as a declaration of religious belief.

Some of these items I have talked about could be useful, others are best avoided, and some should never be used. The latter apart, the decision depends on the context: appropriate for business site and appropriate for personal site are not the same things. The point to bear always in mind is that it is not a good idea to throroughly piss off your site’s visitors. What might seem a cute trick to you (and this is particularly true of alerts) may be a very good way of ensuring that people who chance upon your site don’t come back. Is that really what you want?

© DC 2001. All rights reserved.

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