In our second article about useless clutter on websites, Chris Heilmann focuses on websites that try to reinvent the wheel, features that offer a quick "wow" and little else, and more. Are you guilty of inflicting website knick knack on your visitors? Take a look at the included check list and find out.
In the last article we listed some of the seemingly good but superfluous elements with which Web designers clutter their sites. We covered:
Counters
Close, Bookmark and Print this Window links
Flashy menus that don't help the user
Right-click protection scripts
Animations
Tunnel pages
Background music
This time we will wrap up with some more examples and a list of ideas for how to spot cluttering knick knack.
This time we make the wheel purple
One common mistake that Web developers make (or are asked to make and don’t feel confident enough to refuse to do) is to reinvent basic behavior of the operating system or the browser. One word: don't.
A lot of content is a drag
Many times inexperienced designers, who haven’t grasped that the dimensions of a website are not in their powers but in those of the visitor, will come up with a content area of fixed dimensions. Realizing that there will be too much content to fit in the space, they design a flashy scrolling area using their own scrolling DHTML or flash widgets, discarding the inbuilt browser scroll options.