A Visitor's Bill of Rights

or, what I have learned from standing behind people while they use your home page

[ The Bill | The Checklist | "Yes, but..." | Write me ]

My name is Patrice Wilder. I keep the web pages for a university library here in the Triangle, and three afternoons a week I work the reference desk, which means I spend a lot of time standing behind people at our public terminals while they try to find something on the Web. I have watched a retired pharmacist wait ninety seconds for a page to load and then leave before it finished. I have watched a student in a quiet study room grab for the volume knob because a home page started playing "Greensleeves." I have watched a lot of people squint.

None of those pages were made by bad people. They were made by people who were proud of their pages and wanted them to be exciting, and who have never once stood behind a stranger and watched. So I stand there for you. Here is what the strangers would ask for, if they could write to you. I've numbered them the way the Founders did, because I think they're about that important.

This page practices what it preaches. It weighs about 11K, it arrives in four seconds or so on a 28.8 modem, and the only pictures of mine on it are the six little digits of the counter at the bottom. (I would take those off too, but my department head likes to see the number go up.)

The Articles

Article I. The right to start reading.
No splash pages. A splash page is a front door with nothing behind it but another door: a big logo, a line of text that says ENTER, and sometimes a count-down while a picture loads. Your visitor came for your content. Every page between them and it is a page where they can give up. If you must have a grand entrance, put it at the top of the real front page, and keep it under 20K.

Article II. The right to silence.
No music that plays by itself. People read home pages at work, in libraries, in dorm rooms at two in the morning, and next to sleeping babies. A MIDI file that starts on its own also has to wait for the sound player to load, which on some computers takes longer than your whole page, and on a lot of pages there's no way to find the Stop button because the player is hidden. If you love the song, give it a link and tell people how big it is. Let them choose.

Article III. The right to stillness.
No blinking text, please, and go easy on scrolling marquees, the text that crawls across the status bar at the bottom of the window, and animated pictures. Moving things pull the eye whether we want them to or not. One small animation on a screen is a wink. Six is a slot machine, and nobody can read the words in between. BLINK is the worst of the lot: the text is invisible half the time, and it's the first thing people learn to ignore, which is the opposite of what you wanted.

Article IV. The right to know how big.
If a link leads to a large picture, a sound or a file, say how big it is: "Our new kitchen (photo, 85K)." At home on a modem, 85K is half a minute. Your visitor may want to wait for that. They'd like to be asked.

Article V. The right to a Back button that works.
No new windows popping open without warning. No splash pages that send you on automatically, so that Back just sends you forward again. No frames that trap your visitor and everything they click on. (A technical writer in SiliconValley has written the best case against frames that I know, and he wrote the tutorial too, so he's earned it.)

Article VI. The right to read.
Dark text on a light background, or the reverse, with plenty of difference between them. No navy on black. No yellow on white. No words over a busy tiled picture of clouds, marble or your cat. And please don't set the whole page in the smallest font size: my patrons are not twenty-two, and some days neither am I.

Article VII. The right to words.
Put ALT text on every picture. It's the words that show when the picture can't. A lot more people see those words than you'd think: everyone on a slow modem who has turned off pictures to save time, everyone using a text browser like Lynx, and blind visitors whose computers read the page aloud. To them, a picture with no ALT text is just the word "image," over and over.

Article VIII. The right to know where a link goes.
"Click here" tells me nothing. "Click here" eight times on one page tells me eight times nothing. Make the words of the link say where it goes: not "for my recipes click here" but "my recipes."

Article IX. The right to any browser and any screen.
Not everybody has your computer. Our library still has 640 by 480 monitors in the children's room, one Mac, and a text-only terminal by the stairs. A page that works only in one browser at one screen size has shut the door on the rest. A sixteen-year-old in SiliconValley disagrees with me about this at considerable volume, and I admire his energy.

Article X. The right to leave.
Don't take away the right mouse button. Don't open another window when somebody tries to go. If people like your page they'll bookmark it, and they're far more likely to come back if leaving was easy.

"Yes, but..."

"Yes, but my visitors love the music."
The ones who wrote to tell you so love it. The ones who hit Back in the first three seconds didn't write.

"Yes, but everybody has a fast connection now."
You do, maybe, at work. Most people I know are on a 28.8 or a 56K modem that really connects at something less. See the table on the checklist page.

"Yes, but it's MY page and I'll do what I want."
Absolutely. It's your house and your wallpaper. I'm only telling you what the guests say in the car on the way home.

"Yes, but your page is boring."
I've heard. But you read this far, didn't you?

Before you upload anything, run through the checklist. It prints on one sheet.

Patrice Wilder · [email protected]
I answer every letter, including the angry ones. Especially the angry ones.
Last updated: Friday, September 24, 1999
© 1998-1999 Patrice Wilder. You may print this page and tape it to a monitor.