A Little Note to Web "Designers"

Ovid on 2006-02-22T15:38:36

Hey, you're CSS skills are great. I love those graphics you created. And man, that's some nifty JS you've put together.

But please stop setting the visited hyperlinks to the same colors as non-visited ones!

I know you want your site to be pretty and having a different color for visited hyperlinks clearly offends your deeply held sense of aesthetics, but don't forget that people need to be able to use your site, too.

Thank you. That is all.

Yes, you can usually override this behavior, but most folks using browsers don't know that, nor should they have to.


While you are at it...

itub on 2006-02-22T15:44:45

...please remind them not to use javascript URLs for things that could (heck, should!) be done with normal links!

Re:While you are at it...

bart on 2006-02-22T18:15:08

Damn right. Too many sites that are simply unusable if you don't enable Javascript. And no, they're not using anything advanced like Ajax.

I'm using the NoScript extension for Firefox, so I notice. I have to enable Javascript just to get anywhere... or even, see anything: often they even embed Flash objects using Javascript!

If anything could convince them at all, it's that it's bad for their Google ranking: Javascript only links hurts your findability on search engines.

Don't they read useit?

ajt on 2006-02-22T18:25:17

I believe that any behaviour that is not the norm is a bad idea. It's been a key feature in Jakob Nielsen's work for over a decade, it's not as if good deasign is hard or new...