 | | | Subject: Content.
Posted Aug 8, 2002 by Peregrin
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 | | In a word, content. Anything else is just the icing on the cake. I despise websites that use a lot of flashy graphics and pretty pictures (unless, of course, the pretty pictures *are* the content - I like that  ) to cover up the fact that they have no content of use whatsoever. The Odeon website is a good example of bad design.
A good website should be accessible. Too many sites are indecisive about standards and rely on emerging technology. Sure, Flash and Javascript may be fun, but if the site relies on them, it's alienating people with older browsers, or specialist browsers, such as text-only (for a slow connection) or screenreading (for visually impaired users).
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| | | Subject: Content.
Posted Aug 9, 2002 by Smiley Ben
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 | | Personally, the thing about ALT attributes I find most annoying is that IE totally screws them up. Have the time when trying to produce professional looking website people obviously only leave out the ALT attributes because IE mistakenly renders them as TITLEs... Most people don't want people looking at their sites having annoying tool-tips popping up every time they hover over an IMG...
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| | | Subject: site design
Posted Aug 9, 2002 by Don't be fooled by the rocks that i got, I'm still Jenny; Jenny, from Da Block.
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| | All-flash sites are a bad thing. They're usually designed by people in retro-NHS specs with over-specced equipment, the result being someone with a machine more than a couple of years old either browses away from the site because the content is too much for their machine, or they wish they had.
Like someone else said, there has to be more focus on web accessibility. This is not to say that new technologies don't have their place, and apparantly Flash has been extended to include the screen-reading public within its capabilities. However, the dearth of plugins such as Flash, all subvert the essence of what HTML was concieved for; the presentation of content across a wide variety of platforms.
The worst offenders are the Java scrolling applets, as well as the faux drop-down menu's. Java is cross-platform, and probably the future, touted as the way forward for the internet-enabled home appliances we are currently being told will pervade our lives. I say this: place one of those poxy drop-downs on your site and you annoy those that dont have it with the prospect of a ~10Mb download.
Adobe PDF's are another annoyance as well; those making them probably have their reasons - maybe they dont want their information 'stolen' or something, but it still gets up my nose when my browser is forced to open the clunky and Mac-centric Acrobat software to look at a document that is not cut & pasteable and the software itself is unintuitive for navigating long documents (the most frequent kind of pdf)...
rant over.
promise.
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| | | Subject: site design
Posted Aug 9, 2002 by  Pastey: In Bacchus We Trust
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| | Not all Flash sites are bad. Sorry, but there you go.
The problem is that most people who use Flash don't take into consideration bandwidth.
It's easy enough to set up an initial page with a bit of code that checks bandwidth and then sets the site up accordingly. It's just a shame people don't use this.
The other gripe a lot of peope have with Flash other than the Bandwidth issue is that once written it's harder to update than a static html page. This too is not true. PHP has a plugin now that allows it to write Flash movies dynamically.
The problem with Flash is not that it's used, but that it's not used properly.
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| | | Subject: site design
Posted Aug 11, 2002 by EternalCynic
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| | "All Flash sites are bad."
I agree with Pastey on this one: Where Flash sites lack usability and are high-bandwidth, high-spec only, it's the designer and not the tool who should be blamed. Also, there are some cases where the information is best presented with Flash (animated schematics for one, AI for another).
I agree about the ads though...
By the way, http://www.flazoom.com has a lot of articles and reviews on good and bad Flash websites.
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| | | Subject: site design
Posted Aug 13, 2002 by E G Mel
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| | About the PDF thing, I wish they'd put a note saying it was PDF, usually I notice in the status bar before I click, sometimes I don't and it's really annoying. I don't mind them being there, they're very useful way of downloading and storing information, but I just wish they'd give you a little more warning!
Mel 
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| | | Subject: site design
Posted Aug 20, 2002 by Peregrin
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| | I do design entirely Flash sites, but I *always* provide alternative HTML content, and the index page is HTML with the option of Flash or HTML. This is not only because some computers/connections won't be able to handle Flash, but also because a lot of the clients that visit my websites are visually impaired, and Flash is very accessibility unfriendly. Flash MX improves on this a little, but designers don't tend to use the accessibility options unless they have to.
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| | | Subject: site design
Posted Aug 20, 2002 by Pastey: In Bacchus We Trust
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| | I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Flash banner ads aren't too bad, if used right.
I suppose in a way they're kind of the new Marquee tag. When everyone first started using the Marquee tag it was considered very annoying, but then new uses for it were found and it started to add to a website.
The Flash banner I think is going to be like that. It's possible (although not very easy) to dynamically write the content of the Flash banners. PHP has a Ming plugin that allows for Flash files to be written on the fly, stick that together with a database and other web technologies and the posibilites and uses increase.
Again, it's all down to the way things are used rather than them being used at all.
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