Web usability tip: 5 questions your homepage must answer
- What is this?
- What do you have here?
- What can I do here?
- Why should I be here - and not somewhere else?
- Where do I start?
— Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
Unfortunately, some websites would rather annoy their visitors by:
- Showing a very large image of their logo and name in an unreadable font.
- Instructing the visitors what the “website requirements” are.
- Including the most annoying website text of all time, “Enter Here“.
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The sample website requires Internet Explorer (but I can view it without any problems on Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8), and Macromedia Flash Player (but I think I am using Adobe Flash Player, and its working smoothly). Im just wondering why they are considered as “Requirements”.
Well I can sometimes understand why people would try to push requirements on visitors (although yes, it is completely lazy and unacceptable). I find Internet Explorer so horrible and unpleasant to test for that sometimes I’m tempted to just place a ‘will not work on IE’ sign on the homepage. But as recent surveys suggest IE still commands around 60% of the browser market, this would be pretty bad. So I just resort to minor nastiness, like writing “Best viewed on Firefox, which you can download here” or “Best viewed on anything but Internet ‘Standards? What Standards??’ Sux-splorer. Anyway, just venting. IE sucks.
You want to see more websites like this? Just visit the nominees for the Philippine Web Awards. It really makes me wonder what criteria they use.
Some of those websites are OK, but I agree and also wonder if these truly represent the best that Philippine web designers can come up with. There may be some politics involved in the selection of those designs (the selection of blog designs I find really, really questionable) and perhaps knowing this or that person in the judge panel may have influenced the final selections. This is always one of those things I’ve always hated about our country, how everything is tainted by nepotism or influence peddling. I’m not saying that that’s the case here, but like you said these are very questionable nominees and it begs the question doesn’t it?
This is crap! Sorry, can’t help but say so. =P