Abusing your right to customise and pointing the finger of shame. (Another CSS Thread)

What?

Hello random nonobian. This thread is going to make me sound really egotistical so just try and look past that and see the point I'm trying to make.

As alot of you have noticed, or abused already, along with an editable profile text, Nonoba also gives you the advantage of being able to customise your profile in the way of changing the stylesheet associated with it.

Many of you guys'n'gals have already used this feature to change the way your profile looks, there are some great example of this being done (www.nonoba.com/home or www.nonoba.com/purpleshade and yes, both by the same guy, but awesome nontheless) and there are some REALLY bad examples of this being done (www.nonoba.com/KoG is just one of many). So far it's not looking good either, there are far more BADLY designed profiles than there are nice.

So what exactly makes a bad profile? Here are 9 no-nos of changing your CSS.

The Nine do NOTS for changing CSS.

• Nono #1: Animated Backgrounds.

These can be done really well but unfortunately, they rarely are. If your background is animated it should move in a way which is not distracting from the main content of your page but not so subtle that the reader starts questioning their sobriety. If it's an animated picture of a giant fish swirling around (we'll leave mentioning names to the end), people will not be able to focus on the content.

• Nono #2: Removing Backgrounds.

As much as I try to understand this one, I can't quite grasp why people do it. By removing the background from individual content blocks (such as comments and profile text) you are essentially removing the structure of the page, making it MUCH harder to navigate and use.

• Nono #3: Making Backgrounds indistinguishable from the content.

This is often found with animated backgrounds, but can also be seen when someone things a black/dark background suites their profile text panel. Heck it goes great with the BLACK TEXT. Seriously guys, changing your text color is as easy as adding
color:#FFFFFF !important;
To the edited CSS class. If I have to select the text to read it on a profile, I don't bother and just go back.

• Nono #4: Inserting Flash Elements with auto-playing music.

Sure, you might think that new death-metal song is just AWESOME and want to share it with the world, but unfortunately the internet is a place used by a great variety of people, many of which will have completely different tastes to you. By making a song, sound or even a cute background loop automatically play, you are practically begging half of the users to immediately close the page.

• Nono #5: Sourcing your images from slow hosts, using large flash files.

Listen, that image maybe be U83R cool, but there's no reason you can't use www.imageshack.us to host it. I like to think my internet is quite fast, certainly a large number of Nonobians are going to have much slower speeds than me and they aren't going to want to wait for hours just for the bloody page to load.

• Nono #6: Hiding adverts from your profile.

Seriously guys, not cool. Nonoba has given us alot, for over a year we had an ad-free ride and it was nice. But running this website costs money and profiles are viewed quite frequently, thus being a good source for revenue. The biggest argument for this is, "This is MY space on Nonoba", but NO. It isn't. It's Nonoba's space which they are PAYING for you to own, sure, it's not like your individual page is costing them a whole lot, but collectively, removing your adverts is taking money STRAIGHT from the pockets of the guys who've given you this service. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.

• Nono #7: Screwing with the navigation of the site.

Lets put this simply. If the buttons at the top of the page are indistinguishable from the rest of your page, or hidden to an inconvinient part of the page, you're removing the sameness throughout the site. That's a big no-no. Sure, make it look different, but don't screw around with what the buttons DO or where they are.

• Nono #8: Making the focusbar obnoxiously big.

Okay, I'm not one to talk here, and yes, putting a nice graphic in that place can make the profile look alot nicer, but if your focusbar is bigger than 500pixels in height, you're ignoring the fact that most users will have to scroll a whole page just to get to the top of the main content. Be aware of user's screen resolutions when you make your profile. 800 in width and 600 in height is the bare minimum your site should look nice with.

• Nono #9: Bad Graphics.

This is the biggest, and most prodiminant reason most users' profiles are horrid to look at. Sure, you can make all the fancy imageswaps you like, you can be have all the CSS know-how in the world. But if the graphics you use to REPLACE current elements look like somthing my dog leaves in the back garden then your page is gonna look like crap. This is the one broken most often. THIS INCLUDES DISFACING THE NONOBA LOGO!

Summary

In summary, if you CAN'T do these things, then don't change your CSS! Sure, you might think it's hip and cool to change your page, but really, most people who look at your page are going to think your lack the design knowledge of a stick of butter, and that isn't good.

Don't think you have top change everything! Changing one or two elements CAN be enough, Nonoba is quite a nicely designed site in terms of graphical elements, why are you so content on replacing them with your nasty, sparkly gifs?

Good News though!

If, like me, you're tired of being bombarded by profile's that actually look to beat myspace profiles in the level of unappealing-ness then you can simply add the following to the end of your URL!
?nocss=true
For example, www.nonoba.com/thatuser?nocss=true
will display the user, "thatuser" but with no css on their page!

Ego reminder.

Yup, just to remind you here. I'm not so full of myself that I think I'm suddenly the rule-bearer of CSS. These are things I've seen posted in multiple threads, usually the people who suggest these things have VERY nice profiles (even UNEDITED ones (lé gasp!)). This is just a thread trying to make the site nicer for the rest of us who don't wanna deal with your stange, page-defacing tendancies.

Name and Shame Time!

Below I'll post some examples of people who've done these things so you can see what I mean.
I won't put KoG again because I think he's successfully got a full house on this one.

I'll add names later. I'm going to post this first. :)

EMZ : Nonoba.com/emz - Nono#8.

TAPIX : nonoba.com/tapix - Shamelessly breaking Nono#1, #3, #6 and #9.
.
.

Notice.

This will probably get DOWNRATED by those who OWN the horrid profiles, so help this stay alive by <3


I love you all really, horrid profiles and all.
Toby

Go Toby! :D

I agree with all of that. Please listen to his advice!

Well the text should be readable. Making a user have to select text is BAD design. Removing backgrounds isn't the only option you can REPLACE them.

Having an image that big falls under the large file size thing, also bad design.

#6, they are targeted at games more now, google adsense is context sensitive.

#7 if you'd read what I said, you'd realise I have no problem with editing the buttons, I mean REMOVING the buttons altogether.

If they CANT put decent graphics in, they shouldn't be editing the profile.

From your posts and your profile, it's quite obvious you have no idea what a well-designed page should look like. Yes, I admit you know your css quite well, but when it comes to usability or user-friendliness you obviously have absolutely NO CLUE.

I do like dark profiles actually. You can do dark, grunge pages and still have them WELL DESIGNED. There isn't really any subjectiveness to it, by definition your profiles breaks all the logical rules or usability and the like. It's not a case of "if they don't like it, don't look" either. Nonoba is meant to be a user-friendly site.

I agree with the ads, but as the site is used more, the adverts displayed improve. I agree with the rest of it and the ads being a bunch of crap but they are not that large and you're giving BACK to Nonoba. It's common decency.

There are plenty of decent freeware programs for design and image manipulation.

Finally, you are your own entity, if you don't want to be user-friendly that's your own choice, but your PAGE is part of a bigger picture, it's part of the whole site, anyone should be able to use it.

In my opinion, certain elements should be unchangeable. People take modification a tad too far, and the good profiles are overwhelmed by the bad. It's like myspace.

Demonic, I haven't read all of your posts here, but let me be the first to say that you have one of the most disgusting profiles I've ever seen. I think you should spend less time pretending to be a mod and more time working with graphics.

Nonoba is actually a secret grooming company. ;)

I just found another example of bad CSS. This one broke almost all the rules...http://ww.nonoba.com/zombiekiller222

I was trying to find him! :D

Ha, demonic. For starters, I think my city-scape is pretty well done, I know I'm biased but seriously, yours is pretty damn awful. You've just got black boxes with yellow dots on. Mine is stylised aswell, yours just looks like somthing my baby cousin could do on paint.

Also, insulting home is a bit stupid. I'm pretty sure he does design as a job. You must be pretty deluded to think your profile is nice in the firstplace.

Not all buildings are straight up and down...