Solve THEIR problems - don’t bother them with YOURS!
Imagine going to a church where upon arriving in their parking lot, a ‘greeter’ utters some miraculous word of faith that reduces your roomy GMC Youkon XL Denali into a MINI Cooper. Would you ever go back? I wouldn’t, I need my Toyota T100 extended cab pick-um-up-truck to haul all my old C programming books to the recycling drop-off … but I digress.
I bring up this analogy of unwanted car shrinkage because of some evil JavaScript offered by the good folks at the “Grand View Baptist Church (GVBC) Beavercreek, Oregon,” that to me, has a similarly chilling effect because as Vincent Flanders so succinctly put it in his second book: “… someone forgot that a Web site exists to solve problems — not the site owner’s problems, not the Web site designer’s problems, the Web site visitor’s problems.”
The Problem
Here is what I suspect happened, GVBC is using a Flash-based banner that also doubles as a menu system. Because it has all the height and weight that a Flash animation brings with it, they’ve opted to use Frames, the top one to contain the Flash Banner Menu (FBM), the bottom frame to contain the content.
Unfortunately, it appears that the FBM for GVBC is rendered at a fixed width of 750 pixels. So on their Parent Frame Page (PFP) they solve THEIR problem by forcing a resize AND a repositioning of MY browser using the following script:
self.moveTo(0,0)
self.resizeTo(750,window.screen.availHeight);
</script>
DON’T DO THAT (DDT)! Ever! I don’t re-arrange your furniture when I visit your house, don’t mess with my computer’s browser!
The Solution
While the GVBC has compelling content, the navigation is a killer - and the resize/reposition gimmick is a show-stopper. People might deal with the former, but they’re just not going to put up with the latter; especially when you can simply render the banner image as a .JPEG and employ a little CSS to get the menus to flash a light blue when you mouseover a hyperlink.
Doing this would not only eliminate the need for frames, but would give the webmaster the option of aligning the menu and/or the banner via a variety of means - yes, I’m talking tables for those whose CSS skills aren’t as advanced as David Shea’s.
Another benefit of de-coupling the menu from the banner, is that it gives you the ability to update add or edit items without having to monkey with the graphic.
One other thing I might do is create an “overview” page for each of the main menu categories. This way when you click on the one of the choices, you get a summary of the sub pages instead of a sub-menu change over content from another section (very confusing).
Whatta you guys think? Leave a comment with a solution - or commiserate with my minimized browser width. Just remember to play nice.
