In the ongoing rants about web design… now that I’m paying attention to the design and layout of every website I visit, I’m beginning to really cringe at the horrible trends that are going on. Here’s a perfect example. I think it’s downright comical.
So take a gander at this. It’s an article on the “ExtremeTech” website about some new Intel Core Duo processors. The article is broken into six pages, meaning you have to click “more” six times to get to the end. The crazy thing is that when I had my web browser expanded to 873 pixels wide, a single page was 2706 pixels tall!
You say you still don’t know what’s bugging me? Take a look at the image to the left. I shrunk it to 1/5 the normal size. I also created a translucent green circle near the top. That’s the text of the article! Everything else is ads ads ads, links, links and ads.
Tell me this: what do you think the probability is of a visitor seeing any single ad or relevant link among all that crap?
That takes me to my next pet-peeve: people who place those Google Ads at the top and foremost part of their web pages and shove their content in a small portion somewhere near the bottom. It’s happening with increasing frequency, and I just can’t help but laugh because most of these web pages are really obscure things—I’ve reached them through some incredibly obscure Google search—and these authors have basically defaced their own websites for the hopes of earning a couple pennies at best.
I’ve also been hearing about these new “tag clouds” as the most recent “mullet of the web”.
Egad!
