What's Sun thinking?
Most of the time I’m pretty proud to call myself a Java programmer. When people ask me what programming language I work with, I usually answer Java even though I’ve probably been doing more PHP5 than Java lately.
But every now and then I get a question from a client asking where he or she should download the latest version of the Java runtime. I wish I could offer them something else than java.com.
I mean, look at the page:
What could Sun possibly be thinking here? – 90% of the page is advertising, or something that looks like advertising. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s crap advertising. With sound!.
If I didn’t know better I’d think that I’d written “java.com” incorrectly and landed on some hijacked typein spam-domain.
They’ve found out that can make a lot of money selling advertising space on the main download page for Java. It wouldn’t surprise me if they discover that most people start reading from the upper left corner, and move the actual download link to the bottom right.
It makes Java look bad.
Buddy.
If you ever get in shit for poor webdesign, be sure to have applied the usability goals of Donald Norman, Jacob Nielsen or Jennifer Preece.
If you’ve done so, the critics either don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, their opinion is highly subjective, or they’re only out to get ya (And you can tell them to fuck off) .
Check out both authors for some general, yet extremely important design principles. It might help you as a programmer as well.
Cheers,
Morderud
Yes, I did take a course on Jacob Nielsen’s usability principles at university – however, I kind of lost respect for the guy after visiting his page
.. well, not entirely, but his site isn’t actually a display of tasty webdesign.
I’ll check out Jennifer Preece, thanks for the tip.
I just got Don’t Make Me Think in the mail though, so I might want to finish that one first. Looks interesting.
http://java.sun.com/ ?
Visit java.sun.com, click the “Download Java Software for Your Computer” image .. it links to, yes – you guessed it – java.com. Well, not the main page – but still.
And, the existance of java.sun.com is no excuse for the current state of java.com