Christmas Spirit Gone Awry

Christ­mas is a fes­tive time of year. With it comes a plethora of reds, greens, lights, can­dies, cakes and gifts. It also appears that design suck comes along as well.

Let me start by say­ing that this guy does what he does with his yard and site for a great cause (fight­ing Celiac dis­ease). I’m inclined to say we should all eat less wheat, but that’s not why we’re here. I’m not so cold and heart­less that I won’t say that the guy’s yard isn’t really cool, but his site is just as busy and prob­a­bly equally as annoy­ing to the neighbors.

Um, please stop moving…

We’re here to talk about bad web design. Before we get too much fur­ther, let’s look at the site.

Annoyed yet? I thought so. It’s amaz­ing how many peo­ple will visit and miss the obvi­ous. Great yard, hor­ri­ble site. They com­ment on the site as if they missed what I saw (unless the owner deleted the neg­a­tives). So, on to the stuff that’s wrong.

• Loop­ing MIDI music is eas­ily the bot­tom of the suck bar­rel, but at least he gives the option of killing it.
• Santa / Homer mouse cur­sors? Just say no. Once again, there is the option of turn­ing them off (and even resiz­ing them, though why the hell would you want to make it bigger).
• Move­ment… EVERYWHERE! It’s like a con­trol board with flash­ing lights and warn­ing text. I don’t know where to look at any given second.
• Blink­ing link text. Why? Seri­ously. As if the move­ment that’s already there isn’t enough, now the links have to blink too?
• Blue links on a green back­ground. I’d love to hear from a red-green col­or­blind per­son about their view­ing expe­ri­ence. Granted, that’s not a ton of peo­ple, but I’m not red-green col­or­blind and I can barely make out the difference.
• It’s gen­er­ally con­sid­ered bad form to dis­play your blog poster’s IP addresses (unless you’re OK with script kid­dies know­ing where a per­son dumb enough to post to a blog that dis­plays them lives). Some of the peo­ple here point that out, however.
• Obvi­ously a JavaScript freak, the page is replete with it. God for­bid you click the “High Def” link. Then you get to scroll left and right as well as a mile in the up and down direction.

No real secret here, this site is just poorly designed. The overuse of nov­el­ties is dis­tract­ing to be polite. I’m not too polite, so I’ll say it’s straight annoy­ing. The guy who designed it obvi­ously likes to tin­ker, and doesn’t mind mak­ing a mess. I only hope that I don’t stum­ble across this next year (unless it get’s fixed).

Well, it’s for a good cause, so I think I’ll donate (although, I’ve read that things like that can be cured with a good “heavy metal” detox). Anyway…

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Update: Alek has added a popup for those of us referred from this site. Cool…
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