Bad Web Design: Animation Mistakes...

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Increase Traffic to your Web-site - Traffic Tips and Secrets... We invite you to add ed-u.com to your list of favorites/bookmarks. Internet Explorer users please click here, and others, right click here -> ed-u.com. Also, you can learn how to make any ed-u.com page your start page by clicking here.   Web ed-u.com Bad Web Design: Animation Mistakes By Guest Writer Richard Lowe, Jr. Animation can turn a blah, boring web-site into a work of art which draws visitors back again and again. That's rare because animation is generally not used very well. Most webmasters go through several phases with animation 1) Their site contains no animations at all because they don't know about it. 2) They learn about animation and cautiously add a few here and there. 3) Suddenly, they become addicted to animation, and their site gets hundreds of them per page. 4) Someone tells them this is bad and they remove all of them. After all, it's bad, right? 5) Some years later they learn the truth - animation when used properly is great, when used improperly is terrible. All of us have run into the type #3, the site with animations everywhere. I've even seen pages which have over 100 animated GIFs per page, combined with blinking text, loud colors and strange fonts. Actually, it was quite a site. Almost a work of art ... So what kind of animations (animated GIFs, Flash Macromedia, dynamic HTML and so on) are appropriate for a web site? The thing to remember when adding anything to your site is simple. Ask yourself some questions: Is this enhancing my visitors experience? Whatever you add to the site should make it more likely that people stick around to view your site and come back later to view it again. Is this helping to meet the goal of the web-site? If the purpose of your site is to sell books, then only animations that further that purpose would be important. On the other hand, if you had a Star Trek fan site, then lots of little doodads that improved the Star Trek feeling might not only be appropriate, but are expected. Is this making the site load too slowly? It really don't matter how wonderful your animation is if it takes 60 minutes to download for one second of play time. Very few visitors are going to wait that long for anything. Does the page look jumbled and disorganized? One of the problems with adding too many animations is that it tends to make the pages look terrible. Unless you are specifically trying to create a jumbled look for some reason, clean, crisp and organized is usually better. Is the animation really necessary? An example is the trend towards using transition effects. You've seen those web sites where you click on a link and the new page kind of fades in, or a circle grows in the center of a page or the page slides in sideways. Yeah, these are cute, but in my humble opinion these are just silly tricks that slow down the visitor. A very good rule of thumb regarding animations is "less is better". You can generally achieve a very nice effect with a couple of animations on a page. Keep the number and size down to reasonable amounts. Article by Richard Lowe Jr. Richard is the webmaster of Internet Tips And Secrets. This web-site includes over 1,000 free articles to improve your internet profits, enjoyment and knowledge. Subscribe to his Daily Tips Newsletter by sending a blank email to internet-tips@GetResponse.com or by going to Internet-tips.net Click here to find out how slow pages can actually increase your traffic! Please click here to report inappropriate or "broken" links. Save this site Please don't forget to add ed-u.com to your list of favorites/bookmarks. Internet Explorer users please click here and others, right click here - - ed-u.com - - Also, you can learn how to make any ed-u.com page your start page by clicking here. Share this site Click here to tell your friends, family or colleagues about ed-u.com. Feedback If you know of any advice that could be usefully included on this site, please click here to e-mail. I would also like as much feedback as possible, good and bad. Thank you - Robert Brady.