endellion.me.uk (Gripes about) Web Design
The World Wide Web has been around for a few decades now, and most people have now got used to reading information from a screen. Nowadays with them TFT monitors, the side-effects, such as headaches and watering eyes, are much reduced.
Backgrounds
Even interesting text can be completely murdered by the background. There are some stunning examples of bad backgrounds around, but the ultimate prize must go to the users of that ubiquitous networking site called MySpace. MySpace makes it easy to render all written text completely obscured, and youths all over the world relish its potential.
One of my young friends explained what to do with illegible pages: CTRL+A. I'd never have thought of doing this, but it works. It's also completely ridiculous to have to do this.
Media
No webpage should ever be allowed to start playing muzak on load, yet there are plenty, and not just MySpace either. Luckily Firefox has a plugin to stop this from happening. Unfortunately this means that sites that don't abuse the autoplay, for example the BBC iPlayer, have to have their media clicked on twice.
Yellow text on a White background
It is just not legible. Why bother writing something if it can't be read?
Flashing/moving images
These are very much like the television in the pub. You don't want to see it, but it keeps attracting attention. Irritating isn't the word for it. Included in this is the notion of letters that have
(glitter supplied courtesy of http://freemyspacebackgrounds.co.uk/glitter-text-generator)
WTF? Why?
Frames
And then, one day, there were frames. Luckily they're dying out again now, but there's still quite a few to be seen here and there. They annoy my socks off.
Dark background with light letters
Now that I have one of them shiny screens, I hate this even more. It turns the page into a mirror.
Hit Counters
Apart from the ones on eBay that tell you how much competition there might be for the item you're after, the whole idea of a hit counter seems ridiculous. Either it shows a meaninglessly huge number -- great, either they've messed with the counter or the site attracts a lot of visitors, or it has a very small number. "You are visitor #134 since April 1996." Hmm. Did I really want to know that? The late nineties seems to have been the hayday of the hit counter. Quite a few have stopped working at some point in the past.
Here is a great example, personal details removed:
"Quick cam pic of me" must refer to an image no longer available on the server, and now referenced by the "alt" tag. The counter probably stopped working years ago. And it has frames! Which means the text scrolls independently in its little pink slot. Yay!
Page wider than the screen
I think there's something quite arrogant about assuming that everyone has at least 2000 pixels going across, or that your content is worth the effort of scrolling. This effect is particularly disturbing on eBay, since it's often accompanied by fonts so large that you could read the listing from the back of the garden.