Lately I’ve been in the slow process of redesigning “marcfolio” my business/ portfolio website. It’s going slow because it’s not top priority and I usually only work on it every once in a while when I need a down moment or I’m in between start/ stop points on other projects and don’t have the time to begin the next phase. Part of my process lately has been to look at other portfolio sites and critique. Where others fail I will prevail (at least that’s my thinking).
But as I’ve been scouting around one of the biggest peeves I have is when a website thinks it knows what’s best for my browser (or should I say the designer thinks he knows what’s best). I’m talking about resizing and repositioning. You know what I’m talking about you open a bunch of tabs and suddenly out of the blue the next site takes a hold of your browser window and stretches it to fill your whole screen, or moves the window to the left corner for some strange reason, or worse yet they shrink the window. I can understand where the designer is coming from. He or she wants their work to showcase well with no distractions, but it drives me crazy and make me question the designer.
I think the a good comparison would be a bike seat and the browser. When you go biking you set your seat at a height that’s perfect for you. You might adjust it depending on if you’re going to go uphill or down, but if someone came along and lowered or raised it you’d be pretty upset and likely uncomfortable. The browser I feel is the same way. I set it the size I want, and adjust it if I need to to see more or smaller if Gem wants to watch a movie while I browse. Rarely do I have all 1920×1200 pixels of my screen filled with a browser window. Now if there’s an option that’s great (fullscreen or this window), or if they launch in a new window that’s cool, but lay your greasy paws off my browser.
For your peeved enjoyment here are 4 links to sites (all pretty cool portfolios) that utilize javascript to manhandle your browser window. I hope they don’t leave you feeling too violated. peteredison.com hellohikimori.com granser.de norm.to
