In my few years as a web professional I’ve been the primary developer of dozens of sites, and I’ve had my hands in over a hundred. I’ve written two complete content management systems which power most of those aforementioned sites. I’ve also extensively studied the best design, usability, and accessibility practices and take pride in being able to tell a client what “works” with the utmost confidence. Yet all too often, the response is “well we want it this way”, or “we think this text should be bigger”, or “we think this should go over here”, or, even better, “my friends think this doesn’t work, so change it to something else”. Yet these same clients usually have little to no knowledge of how to make a website or what design elements work best on the web. If they do have design knowledge, it’s usually very, very rudimentary, almost always outdated, and most likely relating to print, which is (of course) a vastly different medium and should be treated as such. In other words, most clients don’t know what works.

Let’s say that you need to get your car repaired and you know absolutely nothing about cars. Would you squabble with the mechanic over the inner workings of the engine? I don’t think so. Would you ask your friend for his opinion, even though he’s equally clueless? Probably not. So why are web professionals not treated with the same respect? It astounds me to no end that many people still view a website as something that is easy to make and maintain. Websites are easy to make and relatively simple to maintain, but it is very difficult to make an effective website and requires expertise not unlike that of a trained mechanic.

Just as anyone can pop the hood of their car and start playing around with the parts, anyone can throw a website on the Internet. But it takes special skill to craft a website that will attract visitors, generate business, and generally serve as a respectable online presence for an individual or company. So please, clients, keep that in mind before you start assuming that you are the expert, simply because the website is for you. No. We are the experts.

To be fair, yours isn’t the only one that sucks – all splash pages (enter gross generalization here) suck. The internet is about content, and splash pages, especially those containing the ubiquitous and oh-so-irrelevant ‘Flash introduction’.

The more clicking a user has to do to get to the content he’s looking for (or the content you want him to find), the less likely he is to actually get there. If I’m shopping for an item and I can buy it at two stores, but one of the stores has three doors blocking the item and the other store has no doors at all, which store am I likely to enter? Common sense would dictate that I would enter the store that’s easier to navigate and has less barriers between me and the content I want.

So why, then, are Flash splash pages so popular? The number of ‘professional’ websites that have useless splash pages – often in a slow-loading medium such as Flash – astounds me. Clients usually ask for splash pages because it gives them a chance to show off, either that they have a big budget or that they like to be f(F)lashy. But what these clients don’t realize is that a splash page can often trip up search engine spider bots, since it represents a barrier between the spider and the real content. The worst case scenario is that the spider will index only the splash page, leaving your content in the dark.

Splash pages are usually self-indulgent and extraneous. Moreover, those who push for their inclusion on a website usually don’t understand the internet as a medium. Flash/splash advocates usually have too much money and not enough brains, so they just throw a whole bunch of cash at a company because they want something that looks ‘cool’ or ‘flashy’ or ‘impressive’ or whatever; usability and content definitely are not priorities. The minority of splash pages that do have content could probably be retooled so that the content is just on the ‘main’ homepage of the website. Jared Spool, who is with User Interface at Macromedia, is quoted on MarketingSherpa.com as saying:

When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to go to their local supermarket and bring a mime with them. Have the mime stand in front of the supermarket, and, as each customer tries to enter, do a little show that lasts two minutes, welcoming them to the supermarket and trying to explain the bread is on aisle six and milk is on sale today. (taken from SEOmoz)

Could you imagine that? I know I’d last about six seconds before either punching the mime in the face or going to a different store. And, in website terms, since you can’t usually punch site owners in the face, then you’ll probably just go somewhere else for the same information.

Jakob Nielson, who would get my vote for the President of the Internet, lists Flash – that fixture of bad splash pages – as one of the Top Ten Web Design Mistakes  of 2005 (all of which still apply today). Nielson writes that Flash intro pages are “so bad that even the most clueless Web designers won’t recommend them, even though a few (even more clueless) clients continue to request them”. Smashing Magazine has an excellent showcase of splash pages, from the very worst to the poorly designed to the not-so-intolerable-but-still-unnecessary. Anytime I come across a splash page – especially one done in Flash – I turn around and walk my virtual self out the door.

I’ll end with another golden Nielson quote from the same article as above – some advice on how to design your website so that you don’t need Flash, splash, or anything of the sort:

Flash should not be used to jazz up a page. If your content is boring, rewrite text to make it more compelling and hire a professional photographer to shoot better photos. Don’t make your pages move. It doesn’t increase users’ attention, it drives them away; most people equate animated content with useless content.

click here!

Click where? Why here? Why not there? Where else am I going to click? What am I clicking on? Where am I going? Those are just a few of the questions that links labeled “click here” raise.

The world wide web should be, in my opinion, a loosely linked repository of semantic resources. That’s the ideal situation, of course; since 99% of everything on the WWW is horrible, we’re not there yet. But we few decent developers can still try to make our websites as semantic and sensible as possible. So, while they should be obvious, links don’t need to jump out of the screen and slap the user in the face. “Click here!”? Seriously? Don’t insult a user’s intelligence. If a visitor wants to follow a link, he’ll follow the link. But, that link needs to speak for itself.

By ‘speak for itself‘, I mean that the clickable portion of text should describe to the user what’s on the other side of the click. If you want to link to a page on, say, your favourite hockey team, don’t write this:

Want to read more about the Vancouver Canucks? Click here!

As you can see, the link (“Click here!”) doesn’t actually say anything about the resource to which it is pointing. Sure, there’s an explanation beforehand. But I would argue that anything surrounding the link is irrelevant; the eye is drawn to the link itself, so that’s where the important information should be. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), in its article “Don’t use ‘click here’ as link text“, recommends that link text should offer an exaplanation of the page to which it links and the information it offers, even when read out of context. The W3C emphasizes that one should not focus link text around mechanics (“follow this link here”), action verbs (“click”), and so on.

Website visitors know what links are and how to recognize them without explaining the mechanics of linking in the text. Too many web developers these days don’t want to give their users any credit. The bottom line is that if a person can figure out how to turn on his computer, open his internet browser, and navigate to a website, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’ll be able to recognize properly styled links. I say ‘properly styled’ because too many website owners try to be too pretty/stylish/different when it comes to presenting links. A link should be the last spot that the user expects to have strange styling. If links are recognizable – underlined, a different colour, an obvious change on hover (larger font, etc.) – users will find and follow them. One need not make the text blinking with a scrolling marquee; an understated but clear indication of a link to another resource will do the job. And, since we’re explaining the target resource in the text of the link, we don’t need to give a silly instruction like ‘click here’ to the user. A stop sign doesn’t say “press on the brake pedal”, nor does the door to a house say “open this to enter”. If we let the link speak for itself and put it in the context of other text, it will look something like this:

The Vancouver Canucks are my all-time favourite hockey team. They have speed, grit, scoring, and defense.

One would expect to find a website about the Vancouver Canucks on the other side of this link. We don’t need to say “click”, “follow”, or even something like “more information” – for example, ‘More Information on the Vancouver Canucks‘ – since the mere existence of the link implies that we’ll be getting more information. Additionally, this link tells the visitor exactly what to expect when he decides to follow without revealing how the visitor should do it.  Remember, not everyone will be ‘clicking’ on your links, since only a mouse clicks. Users navigating with the keyboard, a touch phone, a screen reader, and so on will not be clicking anything (admittedly most users will know what ‘click’ means even if they’re not using  a mouse, but it’s still good practice not to force mechanics on your visitors).

In his excellent article “Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005” (and, believe me, those mistakes still apply today), web usability and accessibility guru Jakob Nielson advises that links should

Explain what users will find at the other end of the link, and include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to enhance scannability and search engine optimization (SEO). Don’t use “click here” or other non-descriptive link text.

As Nielson says, since links are the most common and prominent way for resources on the web to interact with each other, making links confusing and non-intuitive “is a sure way to confuse and delay users”. Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts also recommend against using ‘click here’ since search engines (so they claim) associate webpages with the words used to link to them; vague and irrelevant linking words such as ‘click here’ will only hamper a potential visitor’s ability to find these websites when searching (see, for example, Solo Signal’s “SEO Tip: Please Don’t Click Here“).

A responsible web developer ensures that a website is as accessible, usable, and sensible as possible. Using ambiguous phrases such as “click here” reduce the usabilty of a site by obfuscating one of the web’s most important elements, the link. For more information and references, see the Wikipedia page ‘Click here’.

Well, now that Internet Explorer 8 is officially out of beta, IE 6 is three versions old. If there were ever a time, as a web developer, to come to a conclusion about how to handle the IE 6 problem, it’s now.

For a while I subscribed to the “two versions old” rule: I would continue to support the last two versions of Internet Explorer. For a long time, that meant 6 and 7. Oh, the many nights I spent waiting for 8 to come out! Finally, I could stop pandering to IE6! No more (well, not as many) silly hacks! Decent CSS support! The list goes on!

But it turns out that it’s not so simple. While discussing the IE 6 problem with a co-worker the other day, he remarked that IE8 isn’t actually going to displace IE6 at all. See, since almost all IE6 users are using a version of Windows (most likely 2000) that can’t support IE 7 or 8, it’s not as if IE 6 will disappear and only IE 7 and 8 will remain. Instead, IE6 users will keep using IE6 – since their computers can’t support the newer versions – and IE 7 users will use IE 8. So, IE 8 will replace IE 7, but IE 7 won’t replace IE 6. In other words, we’ll have one standards-compliant browser and one horrible piece of you-know-what. This situation, in effect, cancels out the ‘two versions old’ rule since, of the three most recent versions of IE,

We, as professional web developers and designers, can’t ignore IE 6 – not yet. After looking at the Google Analytics stats for top ten most popular websites that the company I work for has done, the user base for IE 6 seems to be anywhere from 10% – 18% (based on a wide variety of sites, from real estate to brewpubs to motivational speakers). So, on average, 15% of web surfers are still using IE 6. That number has (thankfully!) been shrinking for a while now, but I would argue that it’s just not low enough to cut off support. IE 6 is dying a slow, painful death, and until the numbers shrink some more – I would say 10% of users is a good threshold at which to stop with the hacks – offering support for the browser is just a matter of being a professional and solving as many problems as possible.