A lack of simplicity on the net.

It is Saturday afternoon, well almost evening, and I am sitting here watching the garden get dark as the wind blows the snow around. It isn't that cold outside, only -4, and in about a hour my lovely wife will be home from work. So what have I been doing today? Well I have been surfing around the internet looking at web site designs. I would have thought that companies that design web sites would be aware of the fact that most of the world is still on dial up! But no, they are obssessed with flashy, all singing all dancing web sites, and these damned stupid things take forever to download at 44kbps (which is, let's face it, about as good as you can expect on a 56kbps modem). Hopefully the company will have a little link that you can locate rapidly and click through the flash homepage to the information. But more often than not these days, I guess people are getting fed up of paying thousands of dollars for flash animation that no one ever sees, there is not skip link! So you have to wait for it to download, the listen to the stupid jingle skipping around, as the image moves and dances happily across your screen.

That is not really the worst of it though. Once you manage to get past that stupid flash animation, you are presented with a web site that is so complicated you are lucky if you can even identify the company logo! There will be screeds of links, that their web master considers to be so important that they have to be there on the front page! There will be loads of tiny little print, that you can't read to tell if it is important or not, and invariably they will have overidden the users ability to increase the size of the text (hello people, not everyone who uses the net is 22 with 20/20 vision!) so you have no choice but to strain your eyes trying to read it, or ignore it at your own risk. Let's imagine that you came to this site to investigate the product or service that this company has advertised as providing. Can you quickly and easily locate the information you came for? Of course not, because if you just went straight to that information you would miss all of the wonderful coding that the web master has spent so long working on! All those lovely graphics that s/he created in image ready, and all the quirky little css, javascript and flash atrributes that make the page look as complicated and intimidating as it does. Severa times I have actually given up looking for something on a site, and written to the webmaster to tell them that the site design has put me off purchasing their product/service! OF course the web master doesn't care, they are paid regardless of whether the site is effective or not.

It is interesting to me that way back when people first started to make their own sites, and were using stuff like blinking text (OMG) and flashing images, and quirky little gifs that they had downloaded from freeicons.com, there was great outcry at all that movement being distracting! Take it off! Don't make the text blink at me! They cried as one. Then came along better technology, more complicated web design software, and all of a sudden movement, flashing and jumping images are all the rage again! I know that fads go around in circles, except perhaps parachute pants and the bob, but when did complicated be more attractive than simple? I don't know! I haven't yet met anyone who uses the net daily, who likes all that flashy stuff, and yet we are bombarded with it on almost every page we visit. Worse yet are the people who insist on having music playing on their site! ARGH!!! Admittedly it is better than the computer generated stuff that we used to have, and you can now have MPEG's of Ozzie singing the Star Spangled Banner, but come on people, who wants to wait for the music file to download before they can click away from that page? And what makes you think that music enhances your site? Whose HTML class were you in when you learned that little gem?

I had better start thinking about supper, if you have any ideas on what to do with hamburger, please feel free to let me know.