h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Some are subtle, and have long cycles. Some are not so subtle, and have shorter cycles. These are more annoying - initially they're useful for grabbing your attention. The problem arises when they *keep* grabbing your attention (aka distracting you) when you're trying to read the text of the page.

Some of the best animated gifs do not in fact repeat. They just run through the cycle once when you load the page, and then remain static. Grabs your attention, then just returns to something pretty (or not, as the case may be).

Animated GIFs are indeed annoying if they 're not subtle,
but not even half as annoying as Macromedia Flash.

My advice:
1) Stick to W3C standards (HTML or XHTML, with CSS, and as little as possible one-browser-only features) en follow the Accessibility Guidelines as closely as possible.
2) Keep it simple, well-structured and elegant.

And keep the coding well laid out and easy to read - make it much easier to 'borrow' nifty javascript bits!

But we wouldn't do a thing like that would we!

Have you seen the psion sliding menu bar? It moves at a speed proportional to your distance away from it, V nice

Having just gone in search for a link that should be did you see they appear to have changed to a frame based site now

Ahhh well it only ever used to work with one of my browsers anyway!

Mel

That's the first thing that occurred to me, too - Flash animations are pretty much pointless. They take too long to load up, and the user gets bored with waiting and clicks ahead - or goes to another page. This can be a problem if you want people to spend time on your site.

Flash sites are fine if your audience is those with High speed acces, typically other technology companies.

They are also ok if they're kept small.

And some are worth waiting for (in my opinion anyway!)
www.bigego.com

Mel