What Makes a Bad Web Site
Message from 2022
This post is pretty old! Opinions and technical information in it are almost certainly oudated. Commands and configurations will probably not work. Consider the age of the content before putting any of it into practice.
Breaking Scrolling
Don’t break scrolling. The very first web browsers over twenty years ago could scroll just fine. It’s okay to have pagination links, or to not have transitions as things “load.” Slow loading is the enemy, not a goal.
Thoughtless Layout
That you can break your content into two columns doesn’t mean you should. Two columns makes sense when you’re trying to fit a lot of text on a piece of paper while keeping the number of words per line to a friendly length, maybe about 50 characters. On-screen, you don’t have to worry about saving paper, so you can just have one tall column instead of two small ones.
Keeping everything in a single column on-screen means you don’t have to worry about some algorithm orphaning important lines of a code block.
Glitchy Navigation
Many browsers allow you to navigate by swiping the page, either on a trackpad or a touchscreen. Don’t break this navigation to add superfluous transitions that the browser has already added. Letting the browser handle transitions is okay, since it lets users navigate history faster.
