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.
