Grrrr.

[athelind]

Why do web designers think that re-sizing your browser window without asking is necessary or desirable? Nobody going to a site is going to jump up and down with joy and say, "Hooray! You resized my window so I can't see anything else on my desktop/none of the other pages go to look right!"

At best, the reaction is going to be shrug-who-cares or, for the truly oblivious, "I didn't notice". More often, it's going to range from irritation through "this honks me off so badly I'm gonna make a blog entry" to "no way am I going to buy anything from these annoying fuckwits."

It's almost as bad as a pop-under ad. The usual phrasing of "going to a website" isn't exactly the right metaphor -- you're really inviting the website onto your machine. And just because I invite you into my home doesn't mean you can rearrange the furniture without asking.

If you do insist on the "going to" frame, then think of "going to" a store, and as soon as you walk in the door, someone grabs you from behind and ties a tie around your neck.

Edit: Company websites shouldn't just be ads, either. They should have useful information, vital statistics for products, maybe even PDFs of user manuals.

Comments

[drleo.livejournal.com]

Yeah. That crap drives me crazy. I unchecked all those boxes for the Javascript options on FireFox. <Cartman>You will respect my authori-TAH!</Cartman>

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Agreed, and done the same.

Of course, I've gone farther and disabled Flash(TM) as well. The final clincher was when it started showing up as inline ads on a few of the sites I visit. News sites where I like to spawn a tab for every story I'm interested in, then go back and read them later. Imagine two Flash(TM) banner ads per tab, having spawned about ten tabs from, say, The Register. That made my old 400MHz PowerBook crawl and would generally cause Mozilla to freeze. I've got newer hardware now, but Flash(TM) is still not welcome anymore. It's a technology whose main disadvantage is that people don't know when not to use it.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Why do web designers think...

They do?

[araquan.livejournal.com]

As for the mindset of these web developers... I think it's just arrogance. Their site is important enough for them to have free reign do that, after all, because it's theirs and they made it. Obviously it should be the only thing you pay attention to once you have it loaded.

[lynn-onyx.livejournal.com]

Why do web designers think that re-sizing your browser window without asking is necessary or desirable?

Why?

Because most Web developers are developer-centric in practice, and not user-centric.

Resizing windows is user-hostile.

[thakur.livejournal.com]

I hate shockwave/Flash/Javascript with a vengiance as well..

I go to a website to get information .NOT share a creative masturbation session with a web designer. I dont give a sh** how good you are at animated logos,flash thingies, inyourface Popups. Wierd colours, fancy unreadable fonts, inane sound files and other time and bandwidth wasting abominations...Just give me the info in a form that I can read it.....rant off:)

[collie13.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hate that. As a web developer, I assure you not all of us are quite so arrogant as to assume we should have free rein over your machines. I think site designers who do so are mostly working from poorly designed templates, or are run by the company's Sales division, or are more graphic artists than web developers.

Frankly, site designers who do things like that are embarrassing to the rest of us. ;-p