Saturday 24 March 2007

Web Design... The Deeziners

First of all, my apologies for the lack of posts recently. I haven’t been in the best of health but things are a little better now so here we go...

If you have read my previous post about web designer "Purists" you will know I am now going to write about the second type of web designer... The "Deeziners".

Deeziners are the kind of people who would have absolutely no consideration for the viewing public. They use the proliferation of broadband as an excuse for bloated sites that consume bandwidth like a voracious jungle beast, much in the same way as Microsoft do with Windows (I will blog about this subject in due course). With every increase in internet speed, web sites become more and more technically demanding... unnecessarily so. They seem to think it's "kewl" making 500kb Flash Animations just for a simple button, like we care. The extremely annoying "Splash Pages" that are becoming prevalent just serve to make your internet experience a whole lot less informative as you spend 10 minutes watching an epilepsy inducing corporate logo fly around your screen.

Other Deeziner inconsiderations include site navigation that doesn't work without Javascript or Flash. There are some users that don't have these things installed for various reasons, and therefore you make your sites content completely unavailable to them. Don't get me wrong, I like some of the inventive site navigation that is developed, but some sort of contingency plan should kick in when these technologies aren't available. Deeziners don't care about that though... they're too busy trying to force feed their latest "creations" to clueless companies that think people are impressed by microscopic text. I mean, what is it about websites where you need a magnifying glass to read their uninspiring mission statements? It's not "kewl", it's an inconvenience at best. Worse still, are the Deeziners that render text as graphics to maintain the same look across the different spectrum of browsers in their unreadable nano-font, forgetting that search engine bots can’t read graphics, thus preventing the site being indexed properly. These morons don't think about the flow of a document, they are trying to make the World Wide Web like a glossy magazine, forgetting that people use different browsers, on different resolution screens, in different sized windows. A good website can be visually appealing whilst retaining flexibility for different viewing situations, not that these cretins have any consideration for that.

Deeziners consider themselves to be at the pinnacle, the summit, the leading edge of web design and that everyone else is inferior. These sages of the profession are aloof to the point of rudeness. Anyone who dares to upload a website not containing several megabytes of pointless animation, an annoying soundtrack and a labyrinthine navigation system, is subject to a full dose of their imperial scorn.

The typical Deeziner uses new technology for the sake of it. For example, they will use Flash to display several paragraphs of text, when a simple <p> </p> would suffice. Why? Because it doesn't endear him/her to the elite community they so desperately want to belong to. This group of self-professed experts is an exclusive club of techno-wannabes, and instead of imparting any wisdom to a newbie, they come slamming down on them with the full force of their "Flash for Dummies" manual. These people are truly unpleasant, for whom the term "prat" is woefully inadequate.