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by chrismorgan 2238 days ago
Something really, really annoying about this site: it uses automatically-progressing carousels that cause content reflow below them in the page.

I encounter this sort of thing so often, and it’s really, really bad. Positively awful. Super disconcerting.

In most cases like this, it’s just that one slide is longer than the others. In this case, there are a couple like that, but also for the rest, image tags have been used without specifying their dimensions, so they take up no space as the carousel slide enters, and then once the image starts loading they reflow instantaneously as the dimenions are known.

Please, if you have a carousel, you must make sure that its height never changes as it progresses. (And please always put width and height on your images, too, so the intrinsic aspect ratio can be applied properly.)

Oh, and auto-progressing carousels as a whole are a blight, but a sometimes-just-barely-tolerable one. So long as they’ll just stop progressing once I interact with them! Please!

Does anyone like carousels? I encounter software developers railing against them, I encounter normal people railing against them (from recently, a non-techie had one request about a new site, that the carousel inserted by the developer of the prototype—because it was a part of the WordPress theme used—be removed), I honestly can’t think of having encountered a single person that likes carousels. They’re just all-round irritating.

3 comments

I've been saying this for years but marketing guys love carousels.

If you can afford to hide content why even put it in the first place? Specially on the most prominent part of your website.

If you want to deliver a message focus on essential content that cannot be hidden.

Now I am irritable
Especially for a site filled with charts. I'm trying to compare some data, and all the sudden the data has moved to a new place. I stopped reading after 2 pages, even though I was very interested in the results. Easily one of the most frustrating sites I've used recently.
haha oh man im going to click a link.. is the page done loading..? think so.. here goes... content loads in and moves the target.. clicks wrong thing goddammit!!!