Why your all-graphic website sucks

Using only graphics to build a website is 1996’s version of using Flash to build an entire site. Why?

Your users can’t copy and paste the text. You know, if you were, for example, promoting an event and someone wanted to copy the event description into an email or onto an events website.
They can’t scale the text up — even though Firefox’s page zoom will scale the text-images up, they won’t get easier to read, just uglier.
Inline search doesn’t work.
Screenreaders and webcrawlers are out of luck.
And the page takes forever to load. What’s that? Load times don’t matter so much anymore, now that most people are on DSL? Try loading this page on your phone, over Edge. Blazing fast.

The photo credits are text, not images. The author of this page can’t plead ignorance of how to put text into a web page.

An all-image website doesn’t get in the way of proper scrolling, UI widgets, and functioning URLs (although the URL to this one seems a bit redundant). So building an entire site out of Flash is dumber than using images for all your text. That’s really saying something.

P.S. At least their images are properly transparent PNGs.

P.P.S. At least they didn’t lay the page out using <table> tags. <div> and <span> FTW!

P.P.P.S. This post should not be misinterpreted as denigrating the venerable Cacophony Society or the Brides of March. All denigration is directed soley at their web design. Any failure on the part of the reader to not take this post seriously is not my responsibility.

The Fifth Bottleneck

CodingHorror points out that the game of “find the bottleneck” that is computer performance optimization is always looking for a bottleneck in CPU, disk, network, or memory.

But there’s a fifth bottleneck — a fifth resource most applications wait on. The user.

If an interface is too difficult to understand, or if an action takes too many clicks or keystrokes, the application will be stuck waiting on the user. If an interface is really bad, the application will sit idle while the user is searching for “how to do X in ProApp 8.0,” or reading the manual, or asking their friends for help, instead of working. And the ultimate interface failure, when a user decides to stop using an application, means, from the point of view of performance, that it will never complete — it’s blocked forever.

Sure, a bad interface won’t slow down a computer. But it does slow the user down. And that’s why programmers care about performance – because we humans want to complete our tasks faster, not because we want computers to complete their tasks faster.