Seven don’ts for websites

Source: xkcd

The following is a list of seven things that frequently bug me about websites.

1. Intro page where you have to choose your location or language. If I go to foo.com then the .com indicates that I want to see the American version of the Foo Inc. website. I do not want to see a map of the world where I need to click several times to finally get to my destination. Example: gilette.de. A better solution is to put a link somewhere that allows you to jump to other versions. Flag icons work well here, because you don’t need to understand the language of the current version to jump to a different one (e.g. finding “Germany” on a Chinese website is difficult if you don’t read Chinese).


2. Site version determined by IP location. If you use a web browser, the websites you are visiting know your IP address (five digits such as 127.0.0.1). In principle, this address is completely abstract (as opposed to, say, ZIP codes which can be mapped to a location), but there are databases that allow you to map it back to a location. This works pretty well, but is sometimes abused to automatically switch to the language of your location. But what if you are an American who is abroad and wants to access an American website. Or if you are German and want to check out an American website (not its German version). Example: eonline.com. Solution: A small note in the language the site thinks it has detected. Something like “Click here to see the English version of this page”.


3. Skippable intro page. Often such a page shows a movie that tells you what the website is about. By all means, link to introductory information on the home page, but don’t force me to watch/read it, every time.


4. Complete site implemented in Flash. I don’t particularly like Flash. It still has its uses for video, but most other things can now be done in HTML5. With Flash, you cannot bookmark pages or copy text. The website’s content cannot be found via Google and it won’t work on (most) mobile devices. Furthermore, most Flash websites make up strange new ways of navigation. Why change something that people know and that works well? Example: gilette.de.


5. Ugly URLs. URLs should be compact and easily understandable by humans. That is, one should be able to figure out what a page is about by looking at the URL. Thus, if the page ever goes away, one has a greater chance of finding out where it went. Amazon is both a sinner and a saint here. Some Amazon URLs have a lot of ugly pieces in them (“ref” and such). On the other hand, book URLs sometimes include the ISBN and an abbreviation of the title. This is a great practice, because the ISBN is a unique ID that is useful to both machines and humans and because the title allows humans to figure out what is there. Lazy programmers sometimes let the fact that there is a single script that displays all web pages show up in the URL: www.example.com/display.php?page=start. Even worse are meaningless page IDs (?page=17). Both can be avoided by putting in a little more effort.


6. Content is hard to find. Often, a website shows all kinds of details, so that the things that people are most frequently looking for are hard to find. Especially expert-designed web pages suffer from this, because it is often difficult to focus for experts (in their area of expertise). Examples are bank and government websites. But food websites are also often problematic: I don’t want to play a game, I want to find out about the products and/or their ingredients. Example: See picture above.


7. Error page discards original URL. This is fortunately rare, but every now and then, I discover an error page in my browser that says “page does not exist”. The problem is that the original URL is nowhere to be found: The error page URL has replaced it in the browser address bar (=history cannot be used) and it isn’t displayed on the error page. If there are many tabs open then it’s really hard to figure out what went wrong.

Bonus: Forbidding or enforcing characters in passwords. As if passwords weren’t annoying enough on their own, some sites decide to make handling them even more complicated. Hassles I’ve experienced so far were: At most 10 characters allowed, no punctuation allowed, must use a digit.

Do you need a software license?

Software licenses are necessary evils in this modern law-driven world. There are two instances where you need to be at least aware of them:

• As a content producer: You have created a web page or a program and want to make sure that people use it the way you want them to.
• As a content user: You need a picture for your web site and are not sure where to find one that you are allowed to put online.

As a content producer, you can choose from an abundance of licenses. They even have names that sound partially familiar: Eclipse Public License, Apache License, BSD License, … But the licenses that are best explained for mere mortals are the Creative Commons Licenses: The summary looks as follows:
A separate page then explains what the icons mean. The site provides several ways of including a license: as a button for web pages, as a text file for file archives, etc. You can also choose your license in a wizard-style manner.
An important idea in software licensing is copyleft (the reversed C icon above): You don't exert any copyright over your work, but force derived work to do the same. The latter requirement has led to Microsoft calling copyleft “viral” (a term that has since lost its negative connotation).
So how about you wanting to use a picture? There, Creative Commons (CC) helps you, too: If you do an advanced search on Flickr, you can choose the CC license a picture should have. The same holds for the search options of Picasa Web Albums (when the results are displayed). I usually link back to the picture page underneath the picture or make the picture itself a hyperlink. Wikipedia pictures also carry a CC license. Lastly, the CC site has a search page to search for liberally licensed content.

Taskfox: a GUI command line for the web

The idea of GUI command lines is cool: you have a text field where you enter textual commands with your keyboard. The results are displayed as a graphical user interface with buttons, images, etc. This is fast, because typing is usually quicker than clicking; it scales well, because one does not have the commands to make them accessible; and it is easy to discover the available functionality, because one can use the GUI to show possible completions for what has been entered already, or to browse the commands by category etc.
These GUI command lines have a long history whose examples include Emacs, Oberon, and Quicksilver. The latest ideas come from Mozilla: Taskfox is a GUI command line for Firefox. If you want to find out more, I recommend a video introducing Taskfox and the Taskfox home page.