Outdated site elements, i.e. what is no longer done?

The fact that in almost every aspect of our lives there is a certain seasonality does not surprise anyone. Some trends are fading away, and new ones are coming in their place.

This is what the Wirtualna Polska website looked like at the end of 1998. This view is taken from the Wayback Machine database, where we can find out what a particular site looked like on a particular day.

If I wanted to point out any outdated items in the above view, describing them would take a lot of time. Now you don't see such sites anymore, the style is completely archaic, although at that time it was very in line with modern trends and was absolutely "relevant".

However, I don't know if you know about it, but on many sites before there are still obsolete elements that are actually no longer relevant.

Below you will find a list of them. It can sometimes make good sense to deviate from some of them, but in general they should not be used anymore.

Here are the obsolete elements of the site that are already "gone" (or at least should have gone) )

1. Background music

This has been talked about for many, many years. Putting any song (even with autoplay) in the background of a website is a shot in the leg.

Firstly, many people today surf the Internet while listening to their own music. There is nothing worse than panicking about "stop" or "pause" after visiting a certain website, when the sounds coming from the speakers start to get annoying.

Secondly, we have different musical tastes.

Thirdly, some people may have headphones on their ears while browsing the Internet (from which there is no sound at that time). Going to a site where the user does not expect to hear a single sound at all can be an unpleasant surprise.

Fourthly, let's agree - this is extremely unprofessional. Just like using the Comic Sans font on the menu of a famous restaurant.

It's interesting that such reasons can be multiplied indefinitely. Background music should be avoided at all costs, unless its use is justified in some way (e.g. on a band's website, perhaps at a music event), although even in such cases this step should be justified.

In any case, in all cases, the user should be able to immediately find the buttons responsible for full control over such content.

2. Innovative navigation

Over time, we get used to certain standards.

Some solutions are so ordinary that they become familiar to us. On the other hand, any deviation from the accepted rules violates the established order and can confuse us.

This may be due to the navigation, which:

• looks different on different pages
• contains a lot of content in addition to links
  • li>
  • has a link overlaid on the logo that leads not to the main page, but to a place that the user does not expect to see at all
  • has a completely illogical hierarchy in terms of the order in which individual menu items appear
  • animated in an annoying manner

  What's more, I recently came across a site that "distributed" traffic between different subpages using... an animated cube. It can be rotated with the mouse and select specific tabs.

  Of course, it all depends on the context, because if the specifics of a particular environment somehow allows a certain "anomaly" to occur, there are cases when such an action may be justified .

  Otherwise, it is, unfortunately, a certain excess of form over content, which serves absolutely no one. Well, except perhaps the owner of the site in question, who doesn't care about other users' opinions.

  3. Marquee

  Marquee is something that the list showing the most obsolete web elements could not do without.

  What is it?

  Remember what the web looked like -sites in the 1990s They were full of automatically scrolling bars from right to left. They contained information about the name day, greeted visitors, showed the time ...

  Yes, these are tents.

  They are somewhat reminiscent of Fiat Multipla, but in the world of web design - their should never have been created.

  However, I know cases where people commissioning certain projects wanted to have such bars on their own sites. They are still achievable - with CSS or jQuery, so technically there is no problem.

  However, the bottom line is that using such a solution should be justified. Just like using background music during autoplay.

  4. Custom cursors

  Custom cursors are also obsolete items that are not currently in use.

  They are in the same league as the "falling snow effect" during the winter months. A league that has long lost respect among the whole society.

  However, I would not be myself if I did not find a certain exception in this case.

  Check out the Flock of Siegel website. As you can see, it is quite specific. Of course, it cannot be denied that it has a special atmosphere. It is characterized by unusual navigation and different cursors on the site.

  In certain environments and in certain climates, such a treatment is justified, since everything forms a whole.

  MTV has also used this in the past, placing huge cursors on the pages of some of their programs.

  However, on an official, serious business site, this is a shot in the leg.

  5.Too many fonts

  In a text containing typographic tips for web designers, I mentioned that the choice of fonts is extremely important.

  The use of multiple types is currently avoided. Most often they rely on the first font, which is responsible for "plain text", and the second, whose task is to highlight headings.

  Introducing a few additional styles works against this for two reasons.

  In Firstly, it breaks the consistency, since it is much easier to create an image of a particular site (or just an entire company) using a limited palette of fonts.

  Secondly, the more fonts, the longer the page loads.

  So remember to rely only on the most necessary ones.

  6. Flash elements

  Deprecated flash elements are something that started to be abandoned a few years ago.

  They made us excited, because they were responsible for various unusual actions, animations and so on.

  However, for some time now, the creator of this technology, Adobe, has been urging everyone to stop using it.

  Flash lost in two areas: performance and security. It is ineffective on mobile devices and is sometimes vulnerable to various types of attacks. The role of Steve Jobs, who was not too fond of Flash, was also important in all of this.

  7. Entry counters

  I bet every developer working in the 1990s has come across public counters.

  "You are 123456 visitors to my site!". - who is not familiar with this kind of information?

  Counters of visitors died of natural causes for two reasons.

  The first is usefulness. They used to be equal to the number of people who like a fan page on Facebook. Some people believe that the higher the number, the more respect and reverence the fan page earns. Hence the popularity of various not very ethical actions related to the purchase of likes.

  The second is the possibility of manipulation. Literally after a while, such a counter can be "increased" or a script is inserted that simply shows false information.

  View counting still exists and works well, only now it is carried out using external services (for example, Google Analytics) or the corresponding tool in the hosting administration panel.

  However, these public counters are definitely obsolete elements of websites.

  8. Splashes

  Splatter is a kind of "gate" of sorts.

  Surely you have come across a website more than once that had only text like: "Welcome to my website! Click the button below to move on!" and a button below it.

  Or you may have seen a page that "splits" traffic into two others, such as a company website and an online store, while only links are placed on them without any additional content .

  No more typical front pages.Their role has shifted to landing pages - pages that are more elaborate, but still focused on a specific action. They don't greet or invite anyone, click to go. They "persuade" us to complete a certain task.

  Remember also that content is extremely important right now. A subpage like this that only has two links to images and one sentence of text is useless from an SEO standpoint.

  9. Too much centering

  Some people have a habit of centering as much text as possible. This may not be the case for very detailed blog posts or tutorials, but for fairly large blocks of text it is.

  That's fine as I understand the site owner might have these preferences, but from a convenience standpoint using it is unfortunately a shot in the leg.

  We read from left to right. We read texts best when each line starts just below the previous one.

  Centering is only good for headings or very small blocks of text. Forcing users to read multiple lines of centered text is unfortunately useless and just inconvenient for readers.

  10. "Click here" anchors without context.

  Of course, anchors (text with subscripts) such as "click here" or "read more" still occur, and that's not always a bad thing. Therefore, in the title of this section, you can find the phrase "out of context".

  The main thing is that users know where this or that link leads. Look at this text, by the way, the link in this example will be in bold:

  "Recently I saw a wonderful tutorial. Click HERE to open it."

  Besides that "click here" tells us nothing. We don't know what the textbook is about.

  Using a descriptive anchor makes things look completely different:

  "Recently I saw a great weight loss guide. Check it out at your leisure" .

  This is good for usability because the author tells us what the link is about before the user uses it.

  11. Text Justification

  Text highlighting only makes sense where technology allows for a sufficiently even distribution of spaces between words.

  Unfortunately, this is not the case on the Internet. In the age of responsiveness, we use thousands of different devices, each with a different screen width. Therefore, a line of text has a different length on different devices. Once it can fit four words, another six, and the third twenty.

  Because of this, gaps of different lengths are formed between the words, which, on the one hand, is very ugly, but on the other - makes text difficult to read, as the eyes have to contend with different arrangements of words.

  So Adobe InDesign and books - yes. Sites are not available at the moment.

  Deprecated website elements gone forever?

  There are times when the context of a particular site favors the use of something that is usually considered "extinct".

  Sometimes there are times when reverting to an outdated solution is just beneficial in certain situations.

  Although I hope that some outdated elements, such as "falling snow" on websites during the winter months, will not come back into fashion under any circumstances .