Ways to Avoid the 1998 Look on Your Website
If you've looked around at a few websites, you might have
noticed that many of them look absolutely terrible. In many
cases, this is because they were produced in the early days of
the web's mainstream popularity, but they haven't been
maintained or updated since. The chances are that their creators
have never even looked at them in a modern browser, and don't
realise just how bad they look now. These websites have an
affliction I like to call the '1998 look' - but, unfortunately
for you, even new sites aren't altogether immune to it. The
modern website of the 21st century need a fresh and clean
appearance and needs to be updated regularily. Here, then, are
five ways to avoid becoming a casualty.
1. Don't Use Animated GIFs.
The animated GIF is dead. It was a charming idea, once, letting
us include animations on our pages as easily as normal graphics.
Now, though, it looks extremely dated thanks to the small number
of colours used, not to mention jarring and out-of-place. It's
even worse if you use one of those early-web 'stock animations',
like that spinning @ symbol to represent sending email - there
are very few things that look more amateurish.
If you don't want to look like you don't know what you're doing,
stay away from animated GIFs.
2. Bad Backgrounds.
It's amazing that people still do it, but there are plenty of
websites out there still with absolutely disastrous backgrounds.
Either they'll have a colour that doesn't provide enough
contrast with the text, making the text unreadable, or, even
worse, they'll have a small pattern, tiled to fill the entire
background. Wallpaper-style patterns are one of the most 1998
things in existence, and instantly make your website look like a
joke, not to mention often making it entirely unusable.
So what should you use as a background colour? In almost all
cases, the answer to the question is white - but, if you really
want a colour, make sure it's a restrained background colour
that people can still read your text over. If you're using a
pattern, don't repeat it more than once.
3. Text in Graphics.
Unless it's your logo or possibly a heading, don't type text in
Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, save it as an image, and then put
it on your site. It's supremely silly, and gives you no benefit
whatsoever - not only does it make the text take much longer to
download, but it also stops people from selecting it or doing
anything else they might want to do with it. Not to mention that
text created this way is usually aligned badly and compressed so
that it looks even worse than it would usually.
Keep your text as plain text, and use graphics for pictures.
Text as a graphic is almost always bad.
4. System Requirements.
Listing system requirements on your website is no longer
fashionable, and thank goodness for that. In the bad old days,
sites would write things like "best viewed at 800x600 using
Internet Explorer 4". Did they really think people were going to
switch, just to view their website? It acted like a disclaimer,
saying they couldn't be bothered to make the site look good for
everyone, and anyone using something unusual had no right to
complain. It was, quite simply, terrible.
The end of the Internet Explorer/Netscape war thankfully
consigned these messages to history, for the most part, but
there are still some sites that have them. Don't let your site
be one - it does nothing but make you look hopelessly out of
touch.
5. Open in New Window.
Finally, there's this one, back from the days when graphic
designers were just starting to get to grips with the web and
wanted exact control over everything, including the size of the
web browser. Going to a site would give you a message like
'click here to launch', and the site would then try to open a
new window automatically, with none of the browser's toolbars.
This technique has always been bad (it takes away too much
control from the user), but it's even worse now that so many
users have pop-up blockers thanks to the abuse of pop-ups for
advertising. If you design your site this way, many people will
have trouble seeing it, including people with the latest version
of Internet Explorer. Don't do it.