Coding Horror: Reducing Useless Clutter on Websites

December 26, 2004

Reducing Useless Clutter on Websites

From the Articles That Unintentionally Parody Themselves department:

In the last article we listed some of the seemingly good but superfluous elements with which Web designers clutter their sites. We covered:

Counters
Close, Bookmark and Print this Window links
Flashy menus that don't help the user
Right-click protection scripts
Animations
Tunnel pages
Background music

This time we will wrap up with some more examples and a list of ideas for how to spot cluttering knick knack.

Indeed, how would one spot this kind of problem? Perhaps by reading the very article itself..

screenshot of the 'Reducing Useless Clutter on Websites' article

Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions

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Comments

Priceless ;)

Drazen Dotlic on December 27, 2004 06:04 AM

I actually love the 'Print this window' button. For instance on the devx.com. Usually they break up articles into 5-6 really short pages to maximize the ad revenue. Clicking on 'Print this window' button brings up a new window with the entire text of the article in it.

rizzo on December 28, 2004 03:41 AM

To that I would also like to trash consultancies that ramble endlessly about W3C standards and then attempt to get designers to adhere to those, even when they are neither dealling with HTML or XHTML but ASP.

haroeris_astrum on December 28, 2004 07:01 AM

> Clicking on 'Print this window' button brings up a new window with the entire text of the article in it.

Excellent point; I sometimes stumble on Google results in this format (the "print version") and you're right, I should actively seek it out!

Jeff Atwood on December 28, 2004 10:56 PM