1. Breaking back button functionality

I wrote about this awhile back in “Stop breaking my back button!“. Yes sometimes there are cases where you might legitimately want to stop users from hitting the back button in the middle, like in the middle of a complex form, but I see it being broken in many situations where it just shouldn’t be broken. Complex sites should be no excuse either; look at Gmail, the back button always seems to work just fine here. Even a pop-up message warning you that you may lose your data is better than just breaking the button all together.

2. Underlining links that are not links

Changing the way people are used to seeing and using the web is almost always a bad idea. Example; most of the research I have read says an underlined link will probably be clicked more than a link with no underline. A great piece of insight proving that we perceive an underline on the web as a call to action. Underlined text that is not actually a link is jarring and annoying. Users will click on this and be confused when nothing happens. Anything underline on your web page  should be a link.

3. Disabling middle or right click

This is usually done in some futile attempt to protect copyrighted material. Usually a power user like myself middle clicks or right clicks links all the time in order to open them in new tabs, and instead of getting expected behaviour we are insulted with a messaged telling us not to steal the images or that they are copyrighted. Yes, thank you for assuming the worst, and if I want your images I can get them by viewing your source or just dragging them to a new window. Don’t annoy your visitors by breaking things they expect to work in a certain way.

4. Supporting only 1 browser

If you owned a store, this would be akin to punching every 4th customer in the face as they walked through the front door and then telling them they cannot enter your store because of the colour of their jacket, don’t do it. There is absolutely no reason to support only one browser in this day and age. There are several fantastic browsers out there and some users are very passionate about their browser choice and will not change for it for the pleasure of entering your site. Also be careful with browser detection, on several occasions I’ve seen sites denying  access to browsers that are fully capable of displaying the site.

5. No date on articles

Sometimes I will be reading an article that is time sensitive but it will have no date on it. Even if it is not time sensitive, it should still have a date. Is this article up to date? How long has this been an issue? Should I comment? I briefly wrote about this awhile back in “Usability — the date is very important“.

6. Click here and full URLs – use contextual links instead

I’ve talked about “Click Here” in the past. It’s bad usability, and it’s bad for SEO;  it’s also a personal peeve of mine. First, if you have an underlined link or something that looks like a button there is no reason to explain to the user that they need to click in that spot for something to happen, we aren’t idiots. Secondly, that space would be far better spent telling me what I am clicking, especially with text links. If a visitor is scanning a page or article, they may not be reading every word. Underlined links pop out and when I stumble across “Click Here” it means absolutely nothing. Every link should have context, like “View our privacy policy”, or “download the tutorial in PDF format”. The funny thing is making a link contextual is usually as easy as just removing the click here part and linking the text around it. “Click here to download the 2008 financial report” can now be “Download the 2008 financial report”. Similar to “Click here”, full URLs usually provide no context and are hard to read anyway, put it into context or just name the article or site you are linking. These contextual links will also help with SEO. Google has just as much trouble with “Click Here” as we humans do.

7. 100% flash site

Okay, this one may be a touchy subject, and I recently covered my reasons for this in “Why Flash sites usually suck“. Flash has it’s place and it works well as a modular addon to standard XHTML, but when a site is all Flash it easily breaks a lot of expected functionality. With great JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, MooTools and Prototype it’s easy to add a lot of the effects Flash does without sacrificing web standards, usability and SEO.

8. Enter pages

This one is almost dead, but it still crops up it’s ugly head sometimes. I will even admit back in the day I had an enter page, but back then everyone had one, and it was cool, or a least we all thought it was. Today the web is about speed and snagging a visitors short attention span for longer than 10 seconds. I’m sure the average mind set of an Internet user is “Give me what I want now and fast”. Ever been searching the web and clicked on a link, only to instantly click the back button to Google and find the next best match. There’s a million people serving the same thing you are, your job is to do it better and without annoying your users. Don’t waste your visitors time telling them they are about to enter your site.

9. Opening a new browser windows for every link

This is one that a lot of sites do, even the good ones. It’s one of those things that we web designers are usually forced to do. Visitors can and will open links in new windows if they want, or they will use back buttons to return to your site. Don’t try to hold them to your site, but I doubt any amount of ranting I do will change this particular behaviour.

10. Link depth and pointless clicking

Try to make your information accessible to visitors in as few clicks as possible. With information overload most visitors will quickly tire of clicking around your site if they cannot find what they are looking for. Make it easy, make it fast, and do it with expected behaviour. I’m looking at you Government of Canada.

11. Contact information

Usually you want a way for users to contact you. There are cases like this blog where I want it to be hard for you to contact me (although I probably should have a contact form), because I want to avoid spam and I have a comment system in place for you to communicate with me. Most business websites should however have a very obvious call to action for contact information. I can’t believe how many times I’ve seen sites selling things where the contact call to action is not obvious, better yet, put your contact info in the header,  sidebar, or footer so it’s always visible.

12. Today’s date is (drum roll)

The other extreme of not dating your articles, is to let everyone coming to your site know what the date is today. This is completely pointless, but I’ve actually had this debate with someone who still has today’s date on their site. I’m pretty sure everyone coming to your site already has a clock and date on their computer which may even be displaying today’s date. The date will only serve to confuse people and make them wonder if the content is from today. Don’t waste your valuable web real estate telling visitors something as silly as what the current day or time is.

Why Flash sucks — most of the time

Flash usually sucks because it is used in places where it’s not needed, breaks usability basics, or tries to deliver a rich media experience to people who don’t care. Lets face it, most of us are not coming to a site to see Flash animations, flashy enter pages and load dialogues; sure this was impressive 5 to 8 years ago, but most of us are over it now. I remember animating menus, playing with collision and elastic algorithms I found on the web and drooling at the newest Flash in the Can awards which are still pretty impressive. It was really cool and fun, and there are a lot of places where this will still fly if done right, your website may not be one of them.

Flash sites have to be better than awesome

The only flash sites that will ever hold my attention are ones that are unbelievably clever or awesome on a huge scale, and even if you qualify in both these areas you have to get your users to stay at your site long enough for it to load and initialize. The point I’m trying to make is if you are going to use flash, you better have a good reason for it, you need to be a fantastic flash guru, and it better be freaken phenomenal.

Information, content is still king on the web

People like cool screen savers, even little visual touchy feely apps are getting very popular on handhelds like the iPhone, but when people are searching the web they usually are looking for information. That information is best found in plain text. Google and most of the other search engines index plain text on your site, if it’s content people want they will most likely find your site via Google or some other search engine. Yes Adobe is working hard with search engine providers to make Flash more search engine friendly, but we are not there yet, and even when we are a lot of my reasons for not using flash will still be valid.

I remember several years ago people were talking about high speed bandwidth and how we would be able to use as many graphics and as much Flash and rich multimedia as we craved. Yet here we are and the web is more text heavy than ever. RSS feeds are gaining popularity daily, and in some cases you are seeing less graphics, not more. Why? Because content is king, and so is searchability. There is a whole package to developing a fantastic website and Geeks In Training has a great article called Developing websites — structure, content, and design that delves into this deeper, but we are going to limit ourselves to Flash here.

Flash has changed the web

There is no doubt, Flash has changed the web, and mostly for the better, but it has done it in ways no one could have imagined several years ago. It hasn’t changed how we navigate the web, it hasn’t changed the fundamental structure, or usability, although I would say it has hurt usability when used poorly.

Flash has obviously changed how most of us view video online. It’s also added rich content in what I like to call Flash modules. I define a Flash module as a tiny piece of a website that is Flash based. This could be an advertisement, a video, interactive graphs, a game or application. This is where flash really shines.

Where Flash fails

Full on Flash websites are where things get ugly. I remember visiting a then famous Flash site called Gabocorp in 1997. It blew us all away, us being any web designer / student I knew at the time. I have found an archived version of the original Gabocorp website. I remember this thing took forever to load on my Pentium 133 and chugged and stuttered away as I watched the animation in awe at 3 frames per second. It even held this bold statement:

You are about to enter a new era in website design. This is the new standard for all things to come.

Welcome to the new Gabocorp.

Go

What we have here is a splash / enter page and a Go button, both considered bad by today’s standards. I don’t want to bash this site though, at the time it was jaw dropping and completely innovative, but the web was mostly geeks back then and there was nothing on this site that came anywhere close to what we see today, it was just cool because it was a new technology used in a way we had never seen before and for no other reason. The time when things are cool just because they are Flash is long gone. Yes people are still doing amazing things with it, but for mainstream sites Flash is usually an add-on component.

This brings me back to Flash portfolios, when we look for new web developers and designers we want to see great usability, standards compliant code and an engaging site that we don’t have to sit there and figure out. As soon as you have to explain what a button does (click the cool little animated thingy and drag it to the box) you fail. You have lost me and you have definitely lost Google and the majority of search engines indexing your site. You’ve probably lost all of your less tech savvy users too.

So let get back to basics, the web is not TV, although we may watch TV on it, we expect the containing site to be usable in all the ways that we are used to. I think the topic of usability can scare off some designers, but usability in some ways is easier than design. Design is an art and it’s subjective. Having your site practice good SEO and accessibility for everyone is not subjective, it either works or does not, and you can measure this through your website analytics software.

Usability, usability, usability

Right now Flash sites do not work on iPhones and other handheld devices, if a fraction of your visitors could be coming from these devices than you effectively have zero usability on these platforms. When these devices do support flash there will still be major limitations like file size, download speeds, tiny screens and limited processor power to deal with. Good usability is also even more important on a small screen, so use Flash wisely; impress without sending all your search engine traffic away and give people the great content, applications and experience they came for. Make that experience last past the load screen.

After checking Google Analytics, I found out where all the traffic was coming from, the source was none other than Google Images. If you type Eternal Sonata into Google Images the single image within the article consistently comes up in the first or second place spot.

So I dug around a bit and read over different ideas on how the Google image search engine works. At first I thought it was because I had named the file eternal_sonata.jpg, but a quick search on that shows lots of eternal_sonata.jpg files out there, and some of the top files returned in the search have very cryptic names anyway. That said, the file naming convention can’t hurt, but I think it’s a combination of a few other things.

Image SEO optimization

First, the image attributes are:

title="Eternal Sonata" alt="Eternal Sonata"

Here I have defined the title and the alternative text or alt text. Both attributes are the exact search term that is bringing up this image. The image is also in an article that is all about Eternal Sonata, and my research suggests that surrounding text plays a major role. Right below the image there is text saying “View my updated post and screenshots on Eternal Sonta”. I think screenshots may also work as a keyword for this image. Lastly, I’ve also read that image quality may play a role. The images for both Eternal Sonata articles were snagged from the Eternal Sonta Fan kit on the official site. The image in this particular post was created by me, combining the 4 characters onto a white background and was saved as a fairly high quality JPEG.

So the next time you are applying SEO to your site, be sure to think about your images, especially if they are relevant to the content around them. That said it’s probably best to optimize only relevant images. The benefits of image optimization are also two fold, not only are you helping search engines find you, you’re also making your site more accessible for the visually impaired, and remember that Google and other search engines are very much like a visually impaired user.

Now for some reason I thought that Google would just recognize that it was the same site, but apparently not. After searching around a bit I quickly learned that changing the name / domain of your site is a very bad idea. Now I am slowly building up traffic again and preparing a redesign, but it was a lesson learned, and luckily my site was still fairly new.