Web Clichés
By Michael Swaine
Between you and me and the lamppost, I have a bone to pick with certain babes in the woods who got in on the ground floor of the Web without first getting the lay of the land, and I'd like to bend your ear about this bee in my bonnet.
Twenty-twenty hindsight is all well and good, and I don't want to beat a dead horse or cast the first stone or stir up a hornet's nest or throw the baby out with the bath water since we're all in the same boat, but rather than beat around the bush I'm just going to bite the bullet and lay my cards on the table, citing chapter and verse, and let the chips fall where they may. With all due respect, many Web sites are as dull as dishwater. Oh, they come on like gangbusters, dressed to the nines in their best bib and tucker, but when they get down to brass tacks, they are filled to their eye teeth with clichés.
"Enough with the clichés already!" you say, and not a moment too soon. I was getting a headache from all that banality. Thanks for stopping me. Obviously you are not among those misguided Web-page designers who are currently littering cyberspace with Web clichés. You know what I'm talking about: the Under Construction icon, the Netscape Now icon, the Top 5% icon, the visit counter, the contentless graphics-heavy home page, the no-value-added list of links, and my personal favorite, the Click here! link. Really bad clichés can drive users from your site, but usually they just suck the music out of your opus, making it drone when it should sing.
