Yes, yes all this talk about Web 2.0 is fine. But what about all the differences you see on the web because of it. Does anybody remember what the web looked like in 1999 when IE 5 was all the rage and it came bundled up with Windows 98 SE.
Apart from the most obvious things like better design, usability along with standards there are 7 things about the way a website just looks and feels different now because of most of the below annoyances that have been phased out by better designers. Here’s the breakdown -
Best Viewed In - Remember that phrase, you would see it everywhere! This site is “Best viewed in IE 5.5 or Netscape 6″ coupled with the screen resolution also being stated. This warning was enough for me to just leave the site and never never return. The only sites that still use that wording are the ones that haven’t updated their sites in years, or still employ the same people who run Win 98 SE on their computers. Hello! People it’s 2007…see we have this thing called Firefox, you can even see it from the sky. In fact here is a community message from Pizza Hut. { Update: This link doesn’t work anymore, please read this article to find out more }
Get Flash Player - I’m so glad that Web 2.0 sites don’t have splash pages that say please download AJAX and CSS before proceeding to view our site. That would be a sweet parody though for whoever has time to kill.
But yeah, Web 2.0 has done away with giving you instructions on how to download it due to the fact that everybody put those get flash player badges on their sites, so we don’t need to see it anymore. 98% of the internet population has flash installed.
Tables - With the advent of CSS the web just got more cleaner. There are still some people who refuse to give up using tables to design a web layout, and then there are those that you are just left asking yourself - Why? Pixel perfect positioning with a lightweight web page are just some of the benefits of using CSS to build your websites.
Click here to Enter/Launch - The dreaded splash page that had all the first two requirements was not bad enough - they had to add another click to the experience. One click too many for me. When people visit your site they want to see, read and experience not told to do a bunch of things before they can view your site.
That’s like going to a restaurant and the chef tells you to cut the potatoes so he can fry them and then serve it to you. A great many sites still do practice this evil and they are mostly in the shopping, fashion segment.
The only good thing about a splash page, in the example of fashion, is the language redirection of the visitor.
Flash Intros - Oy! Yay! Yay! I’ll admit I’m guilty of this too. Making those swishy swashy flash intros to please clients of some zippipty chappada pad pa in their sites was a requirement. I have only one company/man to solely blame for this trend. Eric Jordan of 2Advanced.com which brings me to the next one…
Loading please wait…Sigh! Flash you seem to dominate this post. Waiting forever on those 56K modems a couple of years ago was AGONY! Not only that but then sometimes the designer would get creative and break the flash apart and give the files various loading sequences and name them like so - getting navigation…navigation done…getting sound…sound done…finalizing layout…layout created…oh shut the heck up! Exit…
Resizing Browsers - Imagine if you went to digg and they would automatically resize your browser and then you jumped over to delicious and they would do the same, then CNN and so on and on. The chances of you ever visiting those sites again would drop to 0 in a heartbeat.
I could go on and on about more stuff but I want to encourage you to comment and tell me the stuff that I have missed or didn’t think about.
Update: Some additions based on user’s comments of stuff we don’t see anymore on websites today -
- animated 3D gif’s { flames also highly missed…or not }
- blinking text
- Frames
- Marquee’s
- Hit Counters
- Please sign my guestbook
- and many more left on the comments over at digg.
Please also read 10 Elements of Web Design Today.
Technorati Tags: web design, web 2.0, internet
About the author
Hyder has been blogging for the past two years on this blog. He started Weborithm, his web company, in 2007 and along with designing blogs and websites also releases various web related products.
Mike Lewis on April 9th, 2007
1
You left out “Please sign my guestbook.”
Alejandro on April 9th, 2007
2
And the Frames…
Ali on April 10th, 2007
3
Yeah the frames and the sign my guestbook are really somethings I’m glad don’t exist much anymore.
Also I thought of one more
- animated shiny GIF’s
live television on April 10th, 2007
4
Frames
Blink Tags
Animated Gifs (overusage even on corporate websites)
Marquee
Annoying widgets (clocks, news)
Ad banners (480×60)
redmyse on April 10th, 2007
5
Not enough creativity (design-wise)… way too much white. As far as design goes its like a new fad. I’ve stopped going to those “web2.0″ design galleries because they all look the same and started going back to those table-based, flash website galleries because there is always new stuff on there (In no way am I saying flash and tables are better than xHTML + CSS (…I hate flash)). Now, the way social networking has taken off is incredible. I can’t image my life w/o del.icio.us and digg. People pay closer attention to UI and UX.
Paul D. on April 10th, 2007
6
Good article, but I think “ali” and “live television” have the right idea, even if we’re dredging up 1995-era web fashions. A few more things we don’t see any more:
• hit counters (except on eBay pages, *sigh*)
• lame “Cool site of the day” and other award-side web badges.
• web-ring link footers
• background music, particularly lame midi files
• that stupid animated flame gif that used to be everywhere
• “under construction” images
Pensador on April 10th, 2007
7
Paul D. pretty much hit the nail on the head.
Brandon Heat on April 10th, 2007
8
Nice article!! Don’t forget the hideous tag!!
Kevin Osborne on April 10th, 2007
9
I deinately agree with Paul D. especially the background music, at least 75% of internet surfers Listen to music on their computers while surfing the net, then you come across these sites with background music or sound effects, it makes me jump off the site right away…..
John on April 10th, 2007
10
Haaa, those were the days, my friends!
http://budugllydesign.com/archivebud/bud9806/bud.html
Ali on April 10th, 2007
11
WHEW! I’m glad the site is back up again after all this mayhem!
Thanks to all those that dugg it!
28,483 of you can really bring things to a halt!
spambot on April 10th, 2007
12
oh there ARE still plenty of flash sites which take 3yrs to load and/or crash the browser….BELIEVE!
Digital Whiteboard on April 10th, 2007
13
I think that you should take all the suggestions from the posts and add them to your article…I think that people have really pointed out some good examples that were left out. Maybe you could add predictions as to what will be “left out” of webpages 10 years from now.
—
Shredder
Desslock on April 10th, 2007
14
I remember 50% of the sites being “powered” by this or that.
Ali on April 10th, 2007
15
@digital whiteboard
I’ll add them later on all at one go as I get more comments.
Vindberg on April 10th, 2007
16
This website is “powered by” and even nominated for an award - so 1.0ish!
I predict that tags listed below post content will disappear, nobody really clicks on them! Related articles and inline text-links are more appropriate.
Allan Collins on April 10th, 2007
17
I’ve worked for companies that still do marquee text and tables… I was ashamed.
Boring on April 10th, 2007
18
weak.
Dave on April 10th, 2007
19
Hilarious read. I did ALL of these things back in my earlier years.
Michael on April 10th, 2007
20
Would be better with screenshots.
jack skellington on April 10th, 2007
21
well… i am all for css based design, but i still don’t know how to do this (http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/) with css.
10 year from now we won’t be seeing those w3c compliant (or something like that) badges.
Bill on April 10th, 2007
22
Everybody got rid of the tables? You might want to check your own sites’ HTML for those 3 tables you use.
Seriously, CSS-only for the sake of CSS-only is overrated. Tables are still working better if you want cross-browser site with something little more complex than 2-3 columns.
Kyle on April 10th, 2007
23
People don’t use flash intros anymore? What internet are you using? Actually, the last four points are still commonly used today. Resizing the browser window isn’t quite as ubiquitous anymore, but I still see it on new/web 2.0 websites from time to time. That is definitely something that should be outlawed.
Bonghi on April 10th, 2007
24
@jack skellington
Tables, when actually used to represent tabular data, are the right tag to use.
Fun reading, thanks.
Joetek on April 10th, 2007
25
@jack skellington:
Tables don’t have to disappear. Displaying grid data is what tables were designed for!
You just shouldn’t use tables for the layout of your page, thats all.
(cool sorting app, btw)….
Cool article too. Definately brings me back. I’d add to the list:
- Grey backgrounds, or starfield backgrounds
- Times New Roman font
- frame borders/table borders
mattyo on April 10th, 2007
26
@Bill
I agree 100%. I tried giving up tables just because they are seen as ‘old school’ but they still work great, and i have an easier time throwing together a design with a simple table as opposed to placing DIV’s via a style sheet. To each their own, but a non-web designer aint gona know the difference between your pure CSS site and my “old school tabled site”
Tom on April 10th, 2007
27
@ Digital Whiteboard.
Maybe in 10 years time we’ll be looking back at how very little screen real estate was actually given to the articles/information that were supposed to be the main content of any given webpage.
Take a look at the top of this page; between all the banners, sidebars and adverts, only about 20% of the screen actually contains the text that constitutes the article I came here to read.
If I find something I really want to read on the web I am often reduced to copying and pasting the text into a word processor document so that I can get rid of all the clutter that surrounds it. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
bigcow on April 10th, 2007
28
Ha
I recently sat in on a meeting with some guys from a design agency who were pitching for a web job. They wanted my opinion on what they were going in with.
Well, this ‘demo’ had:
1. Table layout complete with those nice 3D borders
2. A ‘Best viewed in’ message
3. Huge image file sizes
4. Tons of auto generated javascript for some crappy rollovers
5. Virutally everything done as an image
6. A fixed width layout of 800px - so it would fit on an 800×600 display (er, yeah)
7. A scrolling marquee delivering sales messages (1984 in every sense of the term)
8. General crappiness - there was more stuff but I sort of switched off after the first few minutes for fear of saying something offensive.
It was all I could do to grin and nod.
Really, truly, after the meeting I pulled up some very old work I did in the mid 90’s and it looked fresher than this new site.
Now on the subject of things you don’t see…
Rotating 3d skull animated gifs with flames and a nice Java reflective lake surface. We should bring that back.
bigcow on April 10th, 2007
29
“as opposed to placing DIV’s via a style sheet”
Not wanting to start a CSS vs Tables debate, there’s no point and I respect your point of view.
But that may be where you are going wrong. Swapping tables/cells for divs is not going to do it. You need to unlearn table layout and instead consider document structure before any form of laying out takes place. Semantic markup is critical to good CSS layout techniques.
I’ve coached a number of people on CSS layout skills and once they get their head around that nugget it seems to click (well 90% of the time anyway)
Purple Sheep on April 10th, 2007
30
Though its interesting to point out that this page has tables on!!
canute on April 10th, 2007
31
im trudly agree
but i have to say
that web 2.0 is like empty for me
they make everything shine, nice, and cool
but i simply love those web taht they are simpel on design, minimalistic, using old resources, and first of all: “content over design” like jodi.org
today, most of all websites ar “design over content” and that makes it empy.
The Business Forum on April 10th, 2007
32
Blinking text is something I don’t miss.
The duke nukem dancing girl is another one.
I think there are still a lot more sites using table layouts than CSS layouts out there. In fact there are probably more designers using tables than CSS out there.
btw: The old days of 1990’s web design is still alive, kicking and stronger than ever. Have you been to myspace.com lately?
Greg on April 10th, 2007
33
Canute
I have to agree about design over content but it’s just so sexy!
Eric on April 10th, 2007
34
Here is a website for a part of the company I work for. http://www.artknapptrains.com
I hate the site, as you will all see why, however they manage to do a lot of business from it, and well that just astounds me. And of course, its best viewed with Internet Explorer.
got_u_shook on April 11th, 2007
35
Animated cursor, even worse, with a trail!
Amy on April 11th, 2007
36
Great article and I also loved the comments for more ideas… ahhh… the good ole days.
ESN on April 11th, 2007
37
Great article! Found you via Digg.
Ali on April 12th, 2007
38
Thanks to everybody that left a comment, watch out for the next post.
coming soon…
Menelik Seth on April 20th, 2007
39
Hilarious list, although I gotta give Eric Jordan credit for making browsing his website an experience.
Here’s one to add (dunno if it’s on dig or not, that place gets on my nerves)
- Mouse Trails!
lol I actually stumbled upon a site that had it, and it was annoying as heck.
- Making all the text (content) one giant JPEG image: so that other people wouldn’t rip off your content :p
- the spinning “e-mail” logo at the bottom of the page
- the spinning “copyright” logo because the webmaster didn’t know how to put © to print the copyright symbol.
- The various “Web-page under construction” animated gifs, esp the one that makes the page look like its peeling off with gears spinning in the background
- Image galleries where the thumbnails are actually the image only shrunk down via height and width attributes, so the page takes ages to load 50+ faux-thumbnails of images (in bitmap format) that are crap quality but still are at least 600KB in size.
- Those scrolling messages down in the browser status-bar that show the time, date etc. and block you from viewing the paths of URLs
- Changing the mouse pointer to question marks, cross-hairs and what-not just to be “different”
Shawn Oster on April 20th, 2007
40
Some things you still see are typos
“…web just got more cleaner…”
Is this an allusion or a typo?
“Some additions based on user’s comments of stuff we don’t see anymore on websites today”
I believe that should be “…based on user’s comments ON stuff…”
Anyway, great article.
Ali on April 20th, 2007
41
@shawn
yeah, well I guess “the web needs to get more cleaner” in terms of language. What can I say nobody’s perfect
Glad you enjoyed the article.
jake on April 20th, 2007
42
no more tables? of course people still use tables! have you looked at your source?
s on April 20th, 2007
43
Marquee hahah that was a good one!
mark rushworth on April 21st, 2007
44
C’mon guys… pretty much every ‘cutting edge’ agency website in existence has most of these features - it seems that whilst we advocate new standards etc to clients we seem unable to implement them ourselves.
im sick and tired of seeing some waste of time splash screen with an ENTER button (or worse you have to guess that clicking on a logo will open the site) and then you get an annoying popup window with some flashy effects that take an age to load in and some random menu system that whilst innovative, its a complete pain to use.
now im no purist but some common sense wouldnt go a miss.
*rant over*
mark
nona on April 21st, 2007
45
I still see the “Best Viewed With” or “Site designed for” phrase;
still the same insanity but now supporting firefox.
this is one of the reasons why I no longer advocate or even support firefox. (other reasons includes too much marketing lies, not enough real usable software, too many fanboys, …)
samhadr on April 21st, 2007
46
hahaha…. Great joke Canute!
I just laughed for 2 minutes straight. The kicker after you hit “Back” added another 30 seconds.
PiRX on April 23rd, 2007
47
We lost “Please sign my guestbook” but got “Digg It” and alikes
Beth on April 24th, 2007
48
Hey, I still use a stats counter. And I’m not ashamed to say I have it on my sidebar. I see no different than showing how many feed/email readers a blog has.
Motorcycle Guy on April 26th, 2007
49
I’m so glad not to see best viewed in or intro pages.
Al on April 26th, 2007
50
That’s funny because I see a lot of those things still being used on web sites.
ivadao on May 12th, 2007
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Hi My Name Is ivaxnp.
Sarah in Orange County on June 6th, 2007
52
Very interesting read. Yeah the 56k days were hell. Back then it was all about who had the coolest loading screens for their flash sites.
Jess on June 12th, 2007
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Hahaha, this is awesome! I remember those “Sign my Guestbook” pages. Great post.
TestName on June 30th, 2007
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Test myfunction comment
Sally on August 21st, 2007
55
Quite poor.
Ali on August 21st, 2007
56
As compared to what???! Stop spamming my blog with your web design links.
Sally on August 22nd, 2007
57
I’m not a spam. I’m just telling my point of view.
Karl on August 31st, 2007
58
“You are attempting to steal copyrighted material! Right Click is disabled on this site.”
…actually I was trying to right click.
Content Writer on September 5th, 2007
59
This is very interesting. As per my experience most of the site we have provided content too are working on Php that is most of them are dynamic content. The plain Html pages are just gone….
hiutopor on September 17th, 2007
60
Hello
Very interesting information! Thanks!
Bye
South on September 20th, 2007
61
“Animated 3D gif’s” man they have been some shocking examples of these in the past.
Sally, design guru on October 21st, 2007
62
Web 2.0 is better than Web 1.0. It contains more useful services and less trash.
onan on December 16th, 2007
63
Actually, thanks to firefox, the browser wars are back in business. there’s way too many website that display a best viewed fro firefox or deisgned for firefox, other more or less subtle ways (http://www.explorerdestroyer.com/) to push firefox and prevent other browsers to actually use the website.
When I encounter a site that tells me to switch to firefox instead of IE to browser their site while I’m actually using opera, is a real pain in the ass.