Other "unfriendly" things often found on web sites are: 1 "Blinking" text--fortunately not so common these days. 2 Words marching across
page. 3 Words marching across status bar at bottom of browser. That's where I want to see URL of link at which my mouse is pointing, for goodness' sake!These gimmicks, along with animated graphics, are extremely distracting, especially to eyes of visitors who are much more interested in what owner of web site has to say.
SUMMING UP: Well, this series of articles deals with some of my personal prejudices. However, things that irritate me might not be important to someone else, and you don't have to take notice of them if you don't want to. Nevertheless, most of these faults ARE considered by genuine professional web designers to be serious ones. While some people insist a web page is nothing like a printed page, and web designers are therefore free to break all rules of good page layout and design, fact remains that if it looks ugly on paper it looks just as ugly on a monitor. Do you really fancy reading a book or newspaper with black pages and white, blue or bright green print, for instance? Well, then, why would anyone want to read something like this on a monitor? However, I'm amazed at number of web site creators who expect me to do just this!
Certainly visitors who can't navigate your site are going to think you're less than courteous. They will probably think you're an idiot if they can't read your site's content because you haven't specified a suitable background colour and your type is same colour as their default background colour. Also, if you don't specify height and width of your images these will take ages to download and your visitors will give up and go elsewhere. I do. Likewise, if you don't use ALT tag so that text-only visitors can read what your picture is about, they won't be tempted to ask for it to load. That's just common sense, surely!
