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Web Designers Have Pet Peeves Too!

A long-long time ago, there was a discussion of Pet Peeves on the WebWomen-HTML discussion list. I've captured some of those in the following summary (all attributions have been deleted; published with permission).



> My biggest pet peeve is animation. Ironically, tho. I don't like it 
> and tend to turn off my browser's support of it when I'm looking 
> around the web, I think it's a fascinating medium and would like to 
> do more of it on my pages -- and I have seen it very effectively and 
> impressively used.


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I was interested to hear from someone on another list (sorry, I can't 
remember which one) say that he had an attention deficit disorder and 
had been known to stick pieces of tape over the screen to block out 
animations so that he could read the pages.


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Pet peeves?  Busy background patterns, blinking text and whole pages of
centered text. :)

Will second, as well, the animation annoyance with a slight modification.
Endlessly-looping animations (note more than one per page) drive me bats.
:)


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I've been lurking...but I just have to get my two cents in here...my pet
peeve is...enormous graphics that won't let you see even the site's text
while they take forever to download. I'm out of there before you can say
"short user session".


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One of *my* pet hates is animated gifs right alongside text (and most
specifically, a letter that posts and unposts itself next to the address
you're trying to read...) -- it's almost impossible to keep your eyes
on the text! Another is Java animations, because they stop the page
ever being "done": you never know if the page just hasn't all arrived
yet or whether you've got it all and it's just that darn giraffe
rolling its eyes that keeps the page forever loading.


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Ohhhh - I don't know.  It's hard to beat the Java animations that keep your
page in loading limbo - that drives me right up the wall!   Also, the cute
little messages that run across the bottom bar of the netscape (in my case)
window that obliterate the important information about where you are, where
you're trying to go, whether or not a host is replying, etc. and so on.


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    Oh... big Corp.'s web site, which is designed by designers asking
for tons of money, 90% of them come with very simple background, over 60% of
them only use plain white background, about 35% of them use left side color
bar to separate the contents and navigation area.

    Personally I never like to see any colorful background, low contrast
emboss-type of background might be preferred.

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Document Created 20 February 1997 | Last Modified 4 May 1997
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