Reasons why news scrollers are bad

This is the most complete list of pros and cons for vertical scrollers. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to discuss that on our next meeting with a client.

Reasons why news scrollers are bad:

  • They are tacky, and reek of end 90ies web design
  • They are annoying attention seekers
  • They lure designers into thinking they can define the size of the screen, they don’t, the visitors do, each of them for themselves.
  • They lure editors into adding far too much content to the page – hidden is not gone, think of the screen reader and text browser visitors.
  • Considering “banner blindness”, they might be useless
  • They might cause memory leaks and slow browsing in some browsers on low spec machines
  • They might confuse visitors with attention deficits or other disorders.

Reasons why news scrollers are good:

  • Clients love them
  • That other site has them (you know, that really cool, bleeding edge one, the… what? Bankrupt? Well, it was a cool site though!)

source

Ran to it this morning, when I was searching for as painless as possible (standards-wise, at least) solution for an information slaughter.

What I like about the DomNews is that there’s a stop function. Every accesibility savvy developer is a star.

Now, if I could just find a way to explain how those Add to Favorites and Make this page my Homepage links shouldn’t go into main navigation area.

Marko Dugonjić is a designer specialized in user experience design, web typography and web standards. He runs a nanoscale user interface studio Creative Nights and organizes FFWD.PRO, a micro-conference and workshops for web professionals.

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