Learn from Bad Web Design

This http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/showtell/story/0,24330,3397366,00.html is at the TechTV website, and it has some good stuff for webmasters or those aspiring to design their own websites. It's very practical stuff about what enhances -- or detracts -- from a website's effectiveness.

What do you think about the points made there?

Garden,
I hate the sites that the colors are so bright or dark they overide the words. I also don't like moving objects on web pages especially articles that move when you move your mouse. It actually makes me rather ill.

me too honibee, in fact, I will get out of them, without reading the article etc., because it gets on my nerves.
and I find the busy backgrounds distract from reading and actually are kind of annoying. and the color thing too, I have actually seen yellow and orange writing, where you can barely see it to read it...........

Thanks gardenwife for the subject!

I may not know what makes an effecticve website, but I do know what does not.

qualcomm.com - The moving blocks are a distraction. Man jumping from rock to rock? A quantum leap? At least one of the pages requires Acrobat Reader. Too complicated!

One Hour Photo - The first thing we are 'told' is to download Flash. We aren't told why. Maybe we don't want to download Flash. Upon entry we must wait and watch the loading bar slowly expand. Nothing is happening; I didn't download Flash?

bawls.com - Moving bottles. What is this? Some game? I click to go to the locater page. I click North Dakota. Oh no. No dealers. No bawls. Back to the frontpage and that dumb exploding scene behind the bottle. I promise myself never to drink a bawls. Although this is the first I had heard of it.

Showtime vs. Canadians - The word sorry is such a negative. I guess if we are Canadian, we made a mistake. There has to be a better way of handling this. Upon entering we are faced with more moving junk. Bye, bye.

fragments.com - Oh no! Another site where we get to watch the loading. But at least we can play games with the mouse til then. I click 'Who We Are' to find the President and CEO, the COO, and the assistant to the President. Who cares? What egos! What are all of these things bouncing around the screen?

One conclusion. If any of these businesses think they are promoting, and therefore increasing sales, they are sadly mistaken.

The website for the movie Signs is hard to navigate and confusing, I think. I SO agree with that article about splash pages. I just think "why is this extra screen here that I must click through to get to the good stuff?". Too many animated gifs are a distraction, too. It is nerve-wracking trying to read something while Elmo or some other creature cavorts back and forth...back and forth...back and forth...At least with Internet Explorer you can turn website animations off, or tell it how many times you want an animated graphic to play through.

There are a small program called proxomitron; it blocks flash, freezes gifs, removes ads, removes pop-ups and does a lot more great stuff:)

You can download it at http://www.proxomitron.org

Excellent! Thanks, Arsenic - I'll probably be using that proggie shortly. :)