Web Design cliches?

[Perseus]

I am thinking of designing a website to be just a blank white page because it seems everything these days is a cliche......haha...anyway, what are some cliches that would make you turn away from a potential client?

1. even though it is eye candy, pastels (sky blue and bubblegum pink) seems to be overused....

2. rounded edges....once again good to the eye, but seems cliche to most....

3. large georgia font....

4. tags.....

5. the hip team player attitude ... "What's all the fuss about? Check this out."

6. I am actually starting to think showing off your links to validation is getting overused

grrrrrrr!!!!!!!!

[Rhisiart]

Wasn't it a plain, simple web page design that partly contributed to Google's early success (as well as their listing system)?

I despair when I see copiuous use of useless text and graphics on a web site and yet cannot find something as simple as contact us.

I came across this site yesterday. Simple.

[Mikuro]

I agree. Many sites are just overcomplicated these days. My favorites sites these days are some elegant blogs. Plain, readable text on a plain background. Oh, and CSS text shadows for titles. That's one of the few things I like about CSS (as a user).

5. the hip team player attitude ... "What's all the fuss about? Check this out."

This, and what Rhisiart said, is a problem across all media, especially in regard to marketing (and, alas, politics). There's actually very little that needs to be said in many cases, since the context explains it all. I grappled with this problem myself when I designed my own software page when I was 15 or so. In the end, I had one short paragraph on the main page introducing it, and that was it. The page looked naked, but it said everything it needed to say. Everything else on the site was useful content users would actually want to have — product descriptions, change logs, etc.

On a somewhat related note, I love Sourceforge, content-wise. I hate it design-wise, though.

A few more for the list:

- "Click here!" Wikipedia is great in this regard. You'll never see something like "for information on such-and-such, click here". Instead, the linked text will be "such-and-such". If you're desperate for a way to integrate information into a normal sentence, you can even say something like "more information on such-and-such can be found at its company's web site". That way you get a sentence that's actually useful in and of itself.
BTW, a Google search for "click here" yields over 1.3 billion hits.

- Static design. A web page isn't a painting, but it's becoming more and more popular to treat it as such. Once upon a time the web was not a medium that even allowed for precise control of appearance. I miss those days. It meant that I could read a page any damned way I wanted. If I liked 18 point text, I could use 18 point text. Today, this is not the case, thanks to absolute element positioning, fixed-width layouts, and general poor design. Most sites give me two choices: Get a headache, or break the layout.

- Flash interfaces. See the above point. For a good example of BAD use of flash, see Myst Worlds (I mean, Click Here!!! )

- Excess of graphics. Apple is very guilty of this. For some reason they choose to put large amounts of text in JPEGs.

And I'm not sure this is so much as a "cliche" as it is a pet peeve of mine, but:

- Buried, hidden links. I stopped using VersionTracker altogether because they don't even let you go straight to file downloads or developer pages. Instead, they force you to go through their own redirection page. And even when you're on that redirection page, you can't get the URL. You can't even speed up redirection with a link. WHY? This is even worse when they label these links "download now!". Where I come from, "now" means now, not "when we're ready to let you". Let me introduce you to my good friend Mr. Dictionary.




As far as I'm concerned, readability is the most important thing in web design. Anything that compromises readability is a Bad Thing™. That includes inflexible layouts, low-contrast color schemes, excessive animation, etc. And all of these things are cliches at this point, unfortunately.

[fryke]

Choose a general design you like. Menu on top? Menu on left side? Both? The actual _content_ should always be at the center of the view. Then make three mockups of a _subpage_, not the homepage. (The homepage comes easily once you have the rest figured out.) Of these three mockups, choose the one which fits the content best. (Ask a few people about it as well.) Take the chosen one and create three more, better defined mockups that are evolutions of the chosen one. Again choose the one best fitting your content. Again ask people about it as well. Then you can actually _build_ that subpage (still not the homepage) in HTML/CSS with pictures. Go from there.

[Rhisiart]

Originally Posted by Mikuro

I agree. Many sites are just overcomplicated these days....let me introduce you to my good friend Mr. Dictionary. .

I agree wholeheartedly with this example.

Isn't all this über web clutter just an example of the Emperor’s New Clothes?

I wouldn't admit to being a good web designer (after all it's not my day job), but I have always believed less is more.

At the end of day the Internet is a utility.

[monktus]

A few years ago I was working on a practical joke site for a large beer brand and the first section of the site had to purposely look bad, basically a very cliched L77T hacker-style site. I got to spend the afternoon looking for the worst animated GIFs I could find, I think it was the most fun I've ever had designing a website.

[Perseus]

- Flash interfaces. See the above point. For a good example of BAD use of flash, see Myst Worlds (I mean, Click Here!!! )

Well I guess the Miller brothers spent their time creating amazing games instead of watching over the design of the website for their games.

[rubaiyat]

I encountered a website just yesterday that displayed a very large, even on my screen, (and obviously unoptimised) Flash movie/interface. It took over 6 minutes to load.

I let it go all the way then quit out of the page, but I doubt they have anything that monitors how many viewers they are losing. Too obsessed by how brilliant it looks on their own machines, I guess.

My bugbears are the cluttered designs with text lines too long for comfortable reading and shotgunned with typos and bad grammar.

Another recent gem was a software site that boldly asked "What is XXXX?"* and then promptly failed to answer the question as only a progammer can.

Most Mac sites are pretty clean and legible. Apple provides a good model that most, not all, follow.

The worst examples are oddly enough PC tutorial sites, who use elaborate techniques to be illegible, indigestable and incomprehensible.

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* It was so memorable I can't remember even its name, think it must be digital beer.