The Good, Bad, and the Ugly Websites October 2, 2012

Today’s Agenda  Take a look at what makes a Good/Bad Website?  Work on your Personal Website.

What is a good, bad, or ugly website? Provide compelling content / something of value  Make sure each page in your website has something valuable to offer. A web page exists to provide something that's useful or interesting to visitors. If your page doesn't have that, then you must fix that problem before you worry about how to present it.  Don't distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sound. Always keep your visitors' interests in mind. Make sure you try to please them, not yourself. Scrolling text does nothing to serve the visitor. If it's on a site it's because the site owner thought, "Let me show how cool I am." Do you see the difference? Don't design the site for yourself, design it for the people who will actually use it.

What is a good, bad, or ugly website? Avoid Sleazy Elements  Don't annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.  Don't use put text over image backgrounds. One reason that text over backgrounds scream "low quality" is because sites that use them are often user-hostile in many other ways as well. Make it Easy to Find Stuff  Minimize clicking!  Limit page length to 2 screenfuls, or 6-7 screenfuls for articles. While you should put a lot of info on each page to minimize clicking, don't go too far in the other direction by putting too much info on a page. You should normally limit a page to no more than two screenfuls of info.  Include a way to get back to the home page, on every page.

What is a good, bad, or ugly website?  Include a menu on every page.  Don't use frames. But there are two serious downsides to frames: First, the address bar doesn't change as you go from page to page. That makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or link to a specific page in your site, or to share that page with a friend by ing them the link. Second, when a page within your site other than the frameset shows up in a search engine, a visitor clicking over to that page will see just that subpage without the surrounding frame. Don't bog your website down  Compress your image files. Graphics software can compress files so they take up less room on your disk, and therefore take less time to load into your visitors' browsers. Get some graphics software and shrink those file sizes!

What is a good, bad, or ugly website? Website Readability  No line of text should be more than about 650 pixels wide.  Don't make your page too narrow or too wide.  Use contrasting colors or simple backgrounds to make your text easy to read.  Make the text large enough to read.  Increase the line spacing (leading) to improve readability.  Don't type more than a few words in ALL CAPS.  Never use more than one exclamation point!  Use a spelling checker.

What is a good, bad, or ugly website? The right and wrong way to use links  Don't underline words if they're not links.  Make links blue or underlined, or both.  Explain what you're linking to.  Don't open internal links in a new window.  Use descriptive link text.  The text of a link should describe what's being linked to. You should never, ever use words like "link" or "here" or "click here" as the link text.  Right way Check out our product specials, best sellers, and gift ideas.product specialsbest sellersgift ideas  Wrong way For product specials click here. For best sellers click here. For gift ideas click here.here

What is a good, bad, or ugly website? Be Accessible  Put your contact info, or a link to it, on the top and/or bottom of every page. Make sure it works, and that it keeps working  Test your links.  Remove dead external links periodically.  Include a "Last Modified" date on the top or bottom of your pages.

What is a good, bad, or ugly website? Other web tips  Don't steal content.  Don't hotlink to other sites' images or MP3's.  Don't ask for "permission" to link to a site.  Don't ask to exchange links with other sites.

Problems?????  Page too wide, words too huge  Random listing on eBay  reviewed June 2008  Shouldn't it go without saying that you want visitors to actually be able to read your page?  The page is so wide that even when the window is maximized to my decent-sized screen (1440 pixels), it still can't be read without scrolling horizontally. Why anyone would do that to their potential customers is beyond me.

Problems?????  Forms are completely broken  Western Union  reviewed May 2008

Problems??? Splash / Flash combo Tropical Smoothie Café reviewed Jan This site tries really hard to give the visitor a bad experience, and succeeds. The first problem is the splash page with the "Enter" button. Users don't want to have to "Enter" a site; once they've arrived they expect to already be there. Second, when you click Enter, you get a pop-up window!

Problems???? Browser stealing LegalFish.com reviewed May 2008 Legal Fish lets you post your legal problem so qualified attorneys can contact you to offer their services. I posted my own issue but never heard back from any attorneys, but that's not why I listed this site. I listed it because they sent me a survey that rudely resized my browser window.

Problems??  Insufficient Information  CatEye  reviewed Dec. 29, 2006  Prospective dealers of this company's products will find that CatEye doesn't care to provide enough information about its products -- or even info on how to become a dealer in the first place!

Problems???? No way to buy their product to buy their product Hotel Interactive reviewed Jan. 2, 2007 How can you sell something if you don't give visitors a way to buy your product?

Problems???? Big Security Vulnerabilityecurity Vulnerability Chase reviewed Nov  Login pages at financial institution websites are supposed to use a secure protocol, to make it a lot harder for someone to steal your login information and hack into your account. Amazingly, the major banking site Chase puts their login form on a completely insecure page. What's more, they lie about the problem, with a link to a "Ways we protect you" page which (falsely) tries to reassure customers that the site is actually secure. Big Security Vulnerabilityecurity Vulnerability Chase reviewed Nov. 2007

Let’s evaluate a website!

For Today:  Create a Personal Website  You should have:  Home Page  3 Pages reflecting you!  School  Interests  Hobbies  Sample of school work  Poem or Story  Sports  Other  Due by Friday. Save your work to my Flash Drive.  Test is coming around the corner……..Friday!