Best css hack / trick to recommend?

[Travis Newbury]

Is that your point? I'm sorry, has anybody here every implied otherwise
that there isn't a place on the web for entertainment sites, for which
HTML and CSS are inadequate? If that's what you've inferred, then I
believe you've misunderstood everyone else's point.

So you agree with me that Flash and "good" websites (not just
entertainment sites) are not mutually exclusive. Is that what I am
reading?

 

[Bergamot]

Why does someone like the color Blue? The sites offer the content I
want, in a format that is easy to use and looks good on my screen. No
other reason.

OK, I have now determined that any time you start slamming CSS layouts
as boring I'll feel confident I can ignore whatever you have to say on
that subject. Your tastes in the sites you frequent has shown that
"design" (however you want to define that) is secondary for the most
part, regardless of your claims to the contrary.

When the content is worthwhile, boring, boxy or cheesy can be just as
good as flashy and is often preferred. Content is still king.

I use to get most of my news from MSNBC.com But
then they changed their site, I didn't like it and went somewhere
else.

We all do that, but your choices are still puzzling for the most part.
BTW, msnbc is completely unusable due to overlapping text all over the
place. It's not any more usable with CSS disabled, either, because
there's no logical organization to the page content. It's a wreck.

I am not (nor have I ever) advocating that every site be fancy with
flash or javascript, but I am saying that there is a viable place for
sites like that on the web. People want them, and they enjoy them.

I never said otherwise.

 

[Travis Newbury]

When the content is worthwhile, boring, boxy or cheesy can be just as
good as flashy and is often preferred. Content is still king.

Yes, ultimately content is king. The goal of the designer is to
figure out what the best way to present that content to its intended
audience is. I guess I just believe there are more "good" ways to
present the content than most here.

 

[dorayme]

That is not what I am saying at all.

You are always saying that a website owner should know their audience.
So perhaps you are not saying quite what you mean?

 

[dorayme]

dorayme wrote:

Here's an example of a web designer who was determined to go the flashy
route instead of just giving the desired information in an easy-to-read
manner--and then provided the straightforward, common-sense approach as
an alternative, but not without condescending to the user first ("If you
are still having trouble, just click *here*, poor child."):

http://www.jrswdc.com/specials.asp

As though the person who wants to know what's going on at this bar each
night is going to swoon in a fit of aesthetic ecstasy because the
information is shown in a pop-up window--especially unlikely when his
browser blocks the pop-up, as mine did.

This is a nice example of a primary goal being unnecessarily fancy with
the straightforward being relegated to fallback. What's more, the fall
back could have been even more straightforward.

It's as if there are forks in the website maker's road at every turn and
one of the alternatives at each stage has a shiny trinket luring the
traveller down the wrong way for no good reason.

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Yeah, and the earth is flat and the Pope is divine and the Inquisition was
morally cleaning and non-Aryans are inferior and the check's in the mail...

You missed the part about his mouth.

 

[Travis Newbury]

You are always saying that a website owner should know their audience.
So perhaps you are not saying quite what you mean?

Or you are not understanding

 

[dorayme]

Or you are not understanding

That is possible. What I do know is that it never seems obvious to me
that "the" way to go is based on what makes money without exploring a
control, namely can you make as much another way.

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Judging from a whole history of missives, the latter is probably the truer
premise. Don't get me wrong now; I'm not saying that dorayme is a witless
wallaby or anything of that nature. It's just that the human brain has
many, many convolutions and her's probably has a few more than most.

Oh, stop beating around the bush...

 

[Blinky the Shark]

I only do that between girlfriends or if I inadvertantly get too close to
one of the seance candles.

On a bad night, if *she* gets too close to the candles, you have to put
out the cat *and* put out your girlfriend.

 

[dorayme]

There you go again, letting logic interfere with perfectly sound
dogma. Did you forget that this is usenet? We don't allow that kind of
thing here.

<g>

I am just adopting the high risk strategy on usenet of crash through or
bust. I accept the consequences.

 

[Travis Newbury]

That is possible. What I do know is that it never seems obvious to me
that "the" way to go is based on what makes money without exploring a
control, namely can you make as much another way.

Ahhhh, there is the dis-joint. My assumption is that we are talking
about an already established site, and these are changes to the site
that either increase or decrease revenue (much like my son's site
which has had an almost doubling effect on revenue when we moved to an
all Flash site with lots of video).

Madam, I present your control.

 

[Travis Newbury]

Well better that than having to get it out of either.

For the love of god will you too just stop... This banter made me
throw-up in my mouth a little.....

 

[dorayme]

Ahhhh, there is the dis-joint. My assumption is that we are talking
about an already established site, and these are changes to the site
that either increase or decrease revenue (much like my son's site
which has had an almost doubling effect on revenue when we moved to an
all Flash site with lots of video).

... I present your control.

Well, it may be that a good control will show you to be correct in your
intuitions.

But I still don't believe that a valid site, with fonts that everyone
has no trouble with, with alternatives for a wide range of folk (not
just 12 year old boys) and done by someone who understands these
matters, will make less money.

There really is a terrible confusion in all of this discussion. For my
part, I don't see the provision of movies, Flash, animated gifs, a lot
of style, as being the opposite of good website design. I am sure that a
lot of straw man ing is going on.

Take the site your son improved the revenue of. Bless him but the
control aspect is not quite scientifically kosher: how it was before.
The control would need to be something more sophisticated. Say, an
alternative by someone as talented as your son plus talented in the
other aspects besides Flash, the sorts of things we talk about here, day
in and day out.

Yes, the real world is a hard place and who has time for this
theorising? Business must be done. Money must be made. But that does not
mean I have to suddenly fall under the spell of your analysis. I suspect
you are simply wrong but that you are probably astute about a few
commercial, time-critical real world pressures.

But try to remember Travis, some of us have strong interests in how the
world could be, not how it grubbily is.

 

[Blinky the Shark]

Blinky started it! He's a bad influence on landlubbers and worms. Of

Snitch!

course you probably have a bad stomach from all the flash sites you've
visited in your errant wanderings to boot.

Ew. Flash.

 

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

In all honesty, I can't remember _ever_ seeing what I considered a good
flash site.

I like <http://www.musearts.com/cartoons/pigs/godot.html>.

There's the occasional site where embedded flash is used to
good effect, usually to demonstrate a process or some such,
but that's about it. Sites that are all flash are almost
always unreadable (thought the zoom in FF3 helps a bit).

 

[Harlan Messinger]

I caved under the pressure.


In all honesty, I can't remember _ever_ seeing what I considered a good
flash site. Maybe once, a long time ago when people were posting examples
of their candidates for one, but if so it must've been pretty obscure.

I came across a truly pointless one:

www.anarizlock.com

It's mostly a Shockwave presentation. It's pointless at two levels.
First, it's a non-interactive page, almost entirely text-based, and
almost as appealing a display could have been created with HTML, CSS,
and a few small GIFs and JPEGs. But second, even if someone thought that
the particular fonts used were essential and they wanted it to be
picture-perfect, then the whole display could have been done as a single
static graphic. The only thing they used Shockwave for is to create the
useless transition effect that appears before the information is
displayed; and only so they could have that flashy but useless
transition effect, they made their page much more complicated than it
had any reason to be an blocked a large number of users. (I couldn't see
it till I was on my fourth browser. I originally looked it up on my
Windows Mobile Treo; then I looked in Firefox 3, where I have Flash but
for some reason this presentation doesn't show up; and then I tried IE,
except I forgot at first to open the 32-bit version instead of the
64-bit version on my Vista Business machine (Flash doesn't support
64-bit IE yet).