Four Types of Webpages To Avoid

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

This recent installment in the Web Usability series will discuss the four types of webpages that should not exist because they are web usability nightmares. Although these were a little more prominent a few years ago, they’re still occasionally stumbled upon.

The biggest culprit for these pages are small businesses that don’t understand the internet and throw you ideas that they simply don’t know all that much about. It’s our job as web designers and/or developers to teach them why it’s a bad idea and to be sure we have good reasoning and an alternative.

Splash Pages

A splash page is a webpage that serves to orient the user when they first arrive to the root (www.example.com instead of www.example.com/subdirectory/) of a website. A splash typically does not contain navigation or the general layout common to the rest of the website.

Why it’s bad

An extra, irritating step is put between the user and content
Splash pages are typically image-heavy. Big images take time to load. This can influence whether a user stays on your page or not
Whatever your splash page does can be done on your website
A repeat user will soon become irritate by the splash page

What you can do instead

Design graphical “buckets” (mini pictures that orient the user to different parts of the website)
Use a large header image on your homepage
In case of language toggles, use a default language, one that appeals to most of your demographic and store the user’s language preference in a cookie.

Flash Intro Pages

Similar to a splash page, these are also located at the root of your website. Although I love Flash, having a webpage dedicated to an animation or a video is a waste of resources. Complications arise with elements such as Skip Intro buttons and making the user work to find out how to avoid your flash page.

In my experience, flash intros want to eloquently present information. Fortunately, most internet users are skimmers and having a line of text show up every 5 seconds isn’t a way to accommodate a user. All the information should be presented out front.

To avoid a flash intro webpage you can:

Use a flash header present uniquely on the homepage
Reconstruct the text you want to present and present all of your info instantly or very quickly

Under Construction Pages

This is typically a webpage that says that content will be “coming soon” and to “check back later!”. I think it’s pretty clear why they’re bad:

Wastes the user’s time clicking the link and clicking the back button to return to a functional page
Looks unprofessional
Users love content, an under construction page doesn’t offer any

What you can do instead:

Don’t link to incomplete pages
If you’re announcing a product or a website, you’re getting visitors and simply don’t have content, list a date and be sure to meet it.

Normally Updated Pages that go Un-updated

These are blogs, news sections, forums, etc. that just haven’t gotten around to being updated. Sometimes they are the result of clients asking for features they don’t quite understand. If you do have a client that’s requesting that you install a blog, etc., be sure to inform them that with a blog should come some sort of schedule or maintenance. Or else, it’s just a weak archive destined to have only visitors from search engines.

A forum’s visitors are the core to its survival, if you and several others are not dedicated to actively posting on the forums, you can be sure there won’t have anonymous web users come and use it.

Cheers and that’s all for now, hope that helps.