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

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).

I couldn't agree with you more (see my message in the forum).

Another pet peeve: Sites that use graphics with words in them where words themselves would do just as well. Impossible to search for, usually useless for people without graphically-enable browsers since people don't usually bother to fill in the ALT attribute in the tag.

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...

It's only the Windoze version of IE that does this. The Mac version behaves perfectly well. Why? Who knows?

I like the TITLE attributes to be used as well as ALT because I rarely download pictures and the ALT text doesn't wrap so it often can't be read. Many designers who use windoze aren't aware that the ALT tag isn't enough.

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.

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.

I'm not sure I disagree with most of what you say Pastey. In fact I think I'd accept it as a worthy refinement of my previous rant.

Bandwidth isnt the only thing tho, you do have the actual speed and abilities of the machine itself; it might have loaded quickly but if its too complex, it'll still play slow....

What has this site done to me?! Why am I contributing?!!!!

Right! No More! At least not for today!!

A point I completely missed yes. The actual processing power of the machine needs to be considered aswell. I suppose that when designing the site you'd need to consider the audience, which most people don't. But then I also suppose that anyone who's got high bandwidth is also likely to have a fast computer.

PDFs are searchable and I just checked a PDF and was able to select all the text on a page and paste is into Notepad. Places use PFD because it is platform independent and the formating is preserved.

All Flash sites are bad. ing Flash banner ads should be expunged from the 'net for all time. (I feel strongly about this.)

"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.

OK I dont think I made myself very clear in the beginning;

I said:

"All-Flash sites are a bad thing.." (note the hyphen)
- meaning sites that are made entirely in Flash

NOT

"All Flash sites are a bad thing.."
- meaning any and every site that has flash in it

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

(smacks head)
Doh!

I plead Fifth Amendment. (I run a fully-Flash site. At least it's not crucial info, right?)

So long as you warn people I suppose it's up to you!

Mel

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.

It is a heck of a distinction isn't it, All-Flash and All Flash

Yes, that little hyphen makes a difference, and should have been in my message about four up from this.

(That doesn't change the fact that Flash banner ads are still annoying.)

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.

The best websites don't require you to have any plugins!

Mel

The websites without plugins often have no content. Sorry, but that's as I see it.
Admitedly it'd nice if the web browsers came with the players built in as standard, but until there becomes a standard to build in, it's not likely.