Overview
This is a tongue-in-cheek, hands-on guide to all those annoying effects you've seen on other sites, and secretly wanted on your own pages.Building Really Annoying Web Sites is a subversive new book that will teach you the long sought-after secrets of how to add all sorts of truly irritating effects to your own personal Web pages. You can make all the menus and buttons in a browser window disappear - change a cursor's shape, without the user's permission, create impossible-to-close pop-up windows. Other fun features include adding aggravating Flash animations and movies, trap users in framed pages if they try to link off your page, and more. Each annoying effect is followed by a section explaining why it would be wrong to add that effect to a Web page, and suggesting a more appropriate approach that well-intentioned users can take, if they so desire. Includes CD-ROM.
Synopsis
This is a tongue-in-cheek, hands-on guide to all those annoying effects you've seen on other sites, and secretly wanted on your own pages.
Building Really Annoying Web Sites is a subversive new book that will teach you the long sought-after secrets of how to add all sorts of truly irritating effects to your own personal Web pages. You can make all the menus and buttons in a browser window disappear - change a cursor's shape, without the user's permission, create impossible-to-close pop-up windows. Other fun features include adding aggravating Flash animations and movies, trap users in framed pages if they try to link off your page, and more. Each annoying effect is followed by a section explaining why it would be wrong to add that effect to a Web page, and suggesting a more appropriate approach that well-intentioned users can take, if they so desire. Includes CD-ROM.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewYou can look at this book in one of two ways (or both):
First, as a cautionary primer on how not to build a web site. It's packed full of no-nos: bothersome backgrounds, tedious text, loathsome links, senseless scrolling, frustrating frames. In this view, you wouldn't dream of annoying your users intentionally; you're merely too close to your work. You don't realize, for instance, how much users hate scrolling. Maybe your site simply can't be chopped into one-screen pages; Miller shows how to add anchor links. You need to present a slide show but hadn't thought about giving the users control over it (appropriate JavaScript code at the book's companion web site).
Then again, an awful lot of sites are annoying on purpose -- so you can also take this book at face value, as the first complete guide to building those. Take pop-up windows: Everyone hates them, but they've become a fact of life, and Miller shows how to build them. Or, how about automatic redirects (which can be used for good or evil). Whatever your purposes, Miller provides the techniques, the code, and (when you must be annoying) ideas for mitigating the offense. (Bill Camarda)
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer with nearly 20 years' experience in helping technology companies deploy and market advanced software, computing, and networking products and services. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.