Club Seattle      

Getting Around
(The page you're on is marked in bold.)

Club Seattle Main Page

Web Site Quality Guarantee

Enter Chat!

Club Seattle Rules

Parties -- Meeting in Person

Shocking Pictures from Past Parties

Party Planner and Bulletin Board
Read it Write in it

Channel Regular Visitors (includes operators)

Getting Added to the Channel Regulars List

How to Connect

Browsers

ICQ -- Another Chat Essential

Jokes Page (not frequently updated -- sorry)

Vince's Channel Operator List

This web site promises to avoid a number of web page features that suck. I hope this helps other web page designers make their pages better, along with just telling about my design preferences. Here's a list of things that suck that I hope you won't find here:

• Time Wasters:
• Annoying Javascript toys that foul up your browser.
• Pointless Java programs.
• Background colors or images that make the text difficult to read.
• Background images that take forever to download.
• Large graphic images that contain nothing but lots of text.
• Stupid animated graphics, other than those in the annoying ad banners we're stuck with.
• "Dumbnails" -- large graphic files scaled to small size with HTML commands, rather than scaled with image editors, so they take less screen space but just as long to download.
• Irrelevant search engine keywords.
• Pointless margins that make pages take many pages to print.
• Anything that requires a "plug-in", unless there's both a very good reason to do it, and almost everyone has the plug-in built into their browser.
• Frames. (In most cases, tables are faster.)
   
• Ugly Web Design:
• Paragraphs of centered text.
• Lots of different fonts and colors on the same page.
• Background images that don't tile properly.
• Ugly graphics, used just because they're free.
• Weird limitations on the size of the browser window.
• Obnoxious MIDI background music. (It's all obnoxious, almost.)
• Frames. (In most cases, tables look nicer.)
   
• Obnoxious Content:
• Chain letters or "spam"
• Urban legends presented as if they were true.
  See Urban Legends Reference Pages and Urban Legends Archive for the straight (and funny) story on lots of urban legends.
• Virus warnings, unless they are backed up by a link to a well-known web site.
  I've used computers since the 1970s, and the only virus I've ever seen, on any computer of any kind, is the harmless-but-annoying Word macro virus. The most common computer "virus" is the virus hoax, which spreads by people who forward e-mail without thinking whether it's useful.
• Any music used without legal permission.
  We don't want BMI or ASCAP to bust us, do we?
• Non-joking use of the term "mission statement".
• Grammar and spelling errors like these:
  • Word pairs like a lot and a while (and so forth), written as if they were single words.
  • Confusing the words to, too, and two.
    To is the opposite of from.
    Too is used like too much.
    Two is a numeral.
  • Confusing the words their, there, and they're.
    Their means belonging to them.
    There is the opposite of here.
    They're means they are.
  • Confusing its and it's .
    Its means belonging to it.
    It's means it is.
  • Confusing plural, possessive, and plural possessive:
    Steves means more than one Steve (plural).
    Steve's means belonging to Steve (possesive).
    Steves' means belonging to more than one Steve (plural possessive).
• Punctuation errors other than where to put quotation marks, relative to other punctuation marks. It's a matter of opinion whether they belong "inside, like this," or "outside, like this".
   
• Follow this link for an intentionally sucky page that violates some of these rules. (It was made by a different Steve than the SteveS who created this page.)

Here are some more things that suck that you probably will find here, even though they suck:

• Advertising banners or pop-ups.
  They suck, but they pay for the web space. (The ads don't even pay me for my time in maintaining this web site, but I'm really doing it just for fun anyway.)
• Cliché web design elements.
  Tell the webmaster if you find any.
• Dead links.
  Tell the webmaster if you find any.
• Obsolete content.
  Tell the webmaster when you find any, except where it's clear that he already knows.
• Grammar, spelling, and factual errors.
  Definitely tell the webmaster about these. He hates them, and definitely doesn't want to see them on his own pages!

Thanks to Web Pages That Suck for lots of good web page design advice.