We’ve all seen them. The ugly ones, the ones that make us wince and squint, the ones that hurt our ears. You know what I’m talking about. Ugly websites. They’re out there, lurking behind every link, waiting to pummel your computer into submission with irritating aural sensations, outlandish colors and styles, and huge images and animation that will choke even the fastest internet connection. Come with me now as we explore some web site design “features” that assault the senses and are enough to drive even the geekiest geek to use a phone and read a newspaper.

Web sites with “mood music”. Just as you start getting into the content on the site, something that almost sounds like music starts playing in the background. You immediately check to see if your cell phone is ringing. No, it’s definitely the computer, playing some MIDI version of a song you most recently heard a snippet of on a late night “One Million of the Greatest Loves Songs Ever Recorded” commercial, or, any Celine Dion song. MIDI is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is an industry standard for connecting keyboards to computers. In the right hands, it’s actually a good thing. A composer can assign the “voices” of many different instruments to each key on the keyboard, becoming a virtual one-man-band. He/she stores a digital roadmap of the composed music in a file that is much smaller in size than a digital music file, like an MP3 file. When played back on an expensive computer synthesizer, the computer plays the sounds dictated by the MIDI roadmap, and makes beautiful music. Ah, but here’s the rub. Your computer is not an expensive synthesizer, and contains within it “voices” of tinny, hollow violins and metallic toy piano plunkings. For me, anyway, this kind of mood music puts me right out of the mood of hanging around their site a second longer.

“ This site best viewed in Internet Exploder 6.0 at 800 x 600 resolution”. This is more or less a cop-out by an inexperienced or ignorant designer. Oh yeah, I’m going to stop everything and change my monitor settings and maybe open a different browser to see your site. Not! The web is all about access for everyone, regardless of platform, system, or browser. The biggest culprits here are designers who use Microsoft FrontPage, the authoring tool of some of the web’s ugliest sites.

More and more sites use Flash or Shockwave animations to create some really awesome looks. I’m all for that – with one caveat. Give me a way out. Give me a button to push to “Skip the Intro” and get into the real meat of the site. Not as much of an issue when I’m at home with the cable modem, but on my 56K dial-up connection on the road, waiting for the 500 KB animation to load is often excruciating.

Speaking of animations, there are way too many gratuitous flashing arrows, opening and closing mailboxes, wandering eyes, and flashing text that screams from the page. And what about the “Under Construction” banner with the barricade with the flashing yellow light on top? Being a web designer myself, I can tell you that every site is under construction all the time. If it’s not ready for consumption, don’t put it up. Ugh.

Finally, some web designers need to remember art class. There are colors that are complimentary, and some that just don’t go together at all. Not to mention those wild backgrounds that make the text on top of them illegible (and can cause severe eye strain). Aargh!

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski