What NOT To Do
Every once in a while, during my daily activities on and about the web, I see something that stops me in my tracks. Maybe a horrible color scheme. Perhaps some very poorly chosen wording. Whatever it is. There are simply times when I sincerely wish there were a Universal encyclopedia of how NOT to behave, and I could create entries as I saw fit.
How could someone manage that?! You’d think that someone literally would have to have been trying their hardest to screw up so royally, in order to achieve such mind-bogglingly astounding levels of failure. It’s really impressive.
As far as web development goes, one time I saw black text on a yellow background, alternating (rather epileptically – you know what I mean) with white text on a black background. That is how NOT to style your webpresence, whatever it is for. Period.
More recently, though, I noted in a flash application, that the developers had chosen to grey out and center the text as it was entered into two input elements. It was highly unnecessary, very unbalancing, and, more dangerously than the rest for the maintainers of the site, very distracting. I very honestly debated entering my email address and would-be password. I’m not sure what made me hesitate, but something about the fact that, in a form that was not centered, on a page in which nothing else was centered. The text I was typing into these input elements, inexplicably, was centered though. Someone got carried away. And someone else OK’d it – that’s almost scarier.
Maybe I’m way off base on this one. Maybe it was really not a big deal. But, personally, this went down in my book of what NOT to do.
The centered input-elements aside. In my own travels – of life, of the internet, on the road – a single quote has had an enormous impact on me. I do not know whom to give credit for it’s astounding wisdom. An intelligent man learns from his mistakes. He is wise who learns also from the mistakes of others. When you see something so flagrantly ill-executed that it makes you instantly piteous and amazed all at once, don’t just wave it off and say “well that was dumb.” Do yourself a favor – take a minute to breathe in the finer, more subtle details of the mishap, and learn not to do the same.