It's just a difference of opinion...
As so often happens in the world of software, someone aquires a version of Dreamweaver and instantly think that the website that they have spend hours working on is now the bees knees. Everyone has gotten this feeling at one time or other, I certainly have (blinking lights and ms clip art was all the rage back in the 90's).
A guy I knew during my my time in Dalian, China, got back in contact today proclaiming that he now has an outsourcing team asembled working as soldiers of fortune. Their mission, to crack open the mythical giant of the US & EU software industry and reap the rewards. Anyhow, we get to chatting about the venture of his and his plans for world-wide domination, he then shows me his website.
My eyes are still bleeding, it looks terrible, it is terrible, small children would run away from this colourful behemoth, grown adults would roll into the fetal position and cry out for their mother. Let's just say it was bad. So anyhow I proceed to give him the benefit of the doubt, I remember saying that blue backgrounds full of ships and bright yellow links have no place in an outsourcing website, that the 90's want their webpage back, that messages to their customers should never contain the phrase "Just do it ,man!!!" and above all that practice of harvesting links pointing to the 90% of the worlds spam resources is just one very bad idea.
To top it all off, during my browsing of this site (I was wearing protective glasses at the time), I was infected with a number of nasty trojans and viruses. My friend has become a spam king. He was wondering why he had no US & EU clients, so I gave it to him straight. Every company, usually gets to give their first impression via their website, getting infected with anything is always a negative in their view. These days so many mediums of information are are all inspected before a deal is done to ensure that the opposite party is legit. My first google search for my friends page yielded results of Viagra, Erectile Disfunction and JS_DLOADER.JS, it's a very weird combination.
One thing I always noticed was a huge divide between website design in the western world and design in China. It's not a bad thing, it's a matter of culture. I always equated it with walking down the main streets of the respective cities, in the middle kingdom you are faced with glaring neon lights proclaiming KTV bars, electronics and noodles, Ireland, thankfully, is a bit more quaint in that regard. So when I see websites in China with all the bells and whistles I don't particularly pay much notice but do spend a lot of time trying to see past the junk for the nuggets of gold that are off to some side. In the western world, things are much more minimalistic, each page focuses on a specific are, one which automatically draws the attention to the users point of view. At the end of the day, it is chalk and cheese, I would have great difficulty designing any Chinese site and vice versa.
I do hope that he takes some of the advice I gave him, but I doubt he will. I'm a minimalist type of guy, I like clean lines, some curves and good content. Flash, FLEX, Silverlight, well those are things I am not into, sure they have their uses, can look very eye-catching but mostly they are just used for evil purposes. I know what I like and can definitely tell you what I hate. Bells and whistles = FAIL. Spam url's = EPIC FAIL....
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Heya rick,
Yeah, both Google and Yahoo now have that functionality. Flash done right can look incredible, but for some reason it leaves me cold. I was more referring to the bells and whistles that you see on Chinese sites, not so much flash, but say links to things that have no relevance to the business of the website. For example, a website that does outsourcing should ideally not have links to dating sites or news sites, it's not common yet happens very often in China...
Good to see you blogging again.
For anything other than Flash Video (which made YouTube et.al. possible) I despise Flash. Resources, a potentially massive security hole and most annoying, no way to click with the right mouse button. It just annoys.
It is without doubt a massive security hole. I have been developing enterprise systems for quite some time now and I have yet to see a single flash based component even being suggested by enterprise architects. It all seems just too much hassle for a bit of bling...
Flash can look very sweet.
I wanted to make an all flash blog a few years ago, but didn't as it was invisible to search engines. Interesting developments recently that google can now pick up on flash text.
Curious to see if that changes anything.
But yes, I tend to agree. Simple=good.