All 2 entries tagged Web Design

Flash! A–ah!

Writing about web page http://vpi.net/

Dilbert.com has just had a redesign, so I decided to complain about how bad the website of the designers is. Each main point has sub-points*.

1. It appears to be entirely Flash-based. This is a bad thing:
   • I can't middle click on anything; well, I can but it achieves nothing. If I want to open a link in a new tab, dammit, who are you to stop me?
   • My scroll wheel doesn't work in the sections that have scroll bars.
   • The "Request a quote" button keeps animating. This is annoying; I don't want a damn quote, and no amount of swooshing is going to change my mind.
   • When I point at "Our Work", some more links slide into view. When I move down to "Clients", the options disappear and I end up pointing at "Our Demo"...
   • Pages take too long to load; without flash I'd at least be able to read some text while images continued loading.
   • Loading new Flash pages doesn't appear to trigger Firefox's progress bar, so it looks like nothing's happening when i look at the place I usually look to see if anything's happening.
   • Since the content never stands still, there is no guarantee that the Home page does not clearly identify what the company actually does.
   • If you disable Flash, the plain text version that replaces the Flash one is rather boring. If they hadn't used Flash in the first place, the "proper" website would be interesting. It also isn't even finished...
   • There's probably more, but I'm sick of the website...

Also I can't see any prices anywhere; not even "ballpark" figures. I don't want to "request a quote"; I want concrete or rough figures now.

(I feel I should point out that I have nothing against Flash itself; when used as part of a webpage (as with YouTube and their videos) it's fine. The problem comes when the entire website is Flash.)

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* There is only one main point; everything that's wrong with the website stems from that one mistake.

: 20 Apr 2008 00:09 |  Tags: Bad Thing Dilbert Flash Randomness Rant Vpi Web Design Website Redesign |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A quick question…

Just a quick question to anyone that knows:

If I’ve got a gradient image repeated across a web page, obviously the image would load the quickest if it was onlt 1 pixel wide, but would scrolling a few hundred images up and down with the page put any more strain on a slower machine than fewer larger images?

: 05 Oct 2006 12:26 |  Tags: Question Randomness Repeated Images Web Design |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem