I received the following question from a reader:
I have made a community based website... I often see the "accept terms" that you have to check mark to register to a forum. Will it be necessary for my forum?
And while many people put up forums and other websites with no terms or disclaimers or other legal information, this may not be the best way to protect yourself and your business. There are many legal pages you can have on a website. Not all sites need all of them, but many sites could benefit from one or two. Which ones do you use?
More Help with Legal Pages
I was thinking about the
Reader's Choice Awards and specifically the
Best Web Designs participants when one of my friends was complaining that some of the nominees were (in his words) "downright ugly". He wondered why, when there were so many good looking sites on the Web, ugly ones seem to get more prominence. So I asked him who he nominated for each of my design categories. And he laughed and said "well, I couldn't think of any for all of them." And I began to wonder, are beautiful Web pages more or less common on the Web than their ugly brethren? So I devised this completely unscientific test. I went to a
random word generator and had it generate 10 words for me. I then went to Google and input those words one at a time into the search engine. I clicked "I'm feeling lucky" to get the first result for that search term. I decided ahead of time that if I got any About.com sites (I didn't, by the way), I would get a new word - as no matter what I think about About.com sites beauty or lack thereof, my opinion is biased because I work for them. I also decided to only accept one page from any given site, so if a site came up for more than one word, I went back to the word generator and asked for another (this happened three times). Once I had my 10 sites I evaluated them based on
principles of design and my own aesthetic. The results are as you see them in my article
Why Are Web Pages So Ugly? As you might guess, none of the pages were something I would really consider good looking, although a couple were okay. Most were downright ugly, and one was almost frighteningly ugly.
Bad Web Design
Stock.Xchng, while not really software, is a tool I use for my Web design work all the time. It's a stock photography and images site, and the best thing about most of the images? They are free. You can find standard stock photo iconic images like the ubiquitous handshake signifying a business deal and abstract photos like these lightbulbs and many other types of photos. It's my favorite stock photo site.
If you've ever tried to build a JavaScript drop-down menu from scratch, then you know how hard it can be. They can get very complicated very quickly, and unless you are building menus all day, everyday mistakes will creep in that can be challenging to find and fix. One solution is to use a tool like FlexiMenusJS to design and build your menus.
More About DHTML and DHTML Menus
