If you are thinking about putting a “toolbar” on your blog, please reconsider right now.
In recent months, I’ve noticed a resurgence of the website toolbar. What is a website toolbar? Usually, it takes the form of a small bar that is on your screen at all times, and it provides little links to supposedly helpful tasks for the visitors of the website. It seems that this company is responsible for most of the madness through their freely available script.
In the toolbar pictured above, you can search the website, translate it, get the sites latest news, or share the page with the community of your choice. Helpful right? Wrong.
NOTE: You can block the most popular of these scripts by adding the following to your hosts file. 127.0.0.1 cdn.wibiya.com
Why are these things a bad idea? In order to answer that question, let’s have a history lesson about the HTML web <frame> and <frameset> tags.
A Brief History of HTML Frames
A long time ago, back when some of you web designers were still sucking on your mom’s teet, there was something called web frames. They enjoyed a long period of use (many would argue too long), but were soon abandoned. The reason frames fell out of fashion was partly due to the fact that when you used them, they wound up taking up a portion of your visitor’s screen for the entire browsing session. The problem was that the tasks provided on these frames weren’t used very often and it just ended up occupying a good chunk of the screens of the small monitors available at the time.
Why are toolbars and all position:fixed elements bad thing?
For the same reason the frame menu and toolbar were bad ideas, these new toolbars are almost always bad ideas. (This also goes for position:fixed menus and overlays of all kinds!) I can tell you right now that the supposed benefit of these widgets and what-have-yous is not needed and actually makes your website worse.
Let’s take a look at the toolbar in the image; what does it offer?
- Search
- Language translation
- Latest news
- Random (?)
- RSS/sharing
Where have I seen the search, translation and sharing before? Oh yeah, they are all already built into my web browser!
That leaves latest news and random. Very rarely will I ever be reading an article and say to myself, “what is the latest news offered by this website?” Perhaps a better place for the latest news would be at the end of the article I’m reading or at the very least, off to the side of it. And FFS, random, seriously? Despite what you’ve learned in cryptography class, randomness will not increase the chances of your visitor sticking around.
I think we can all agree that a random button has no business on my screen 100% of the time.
Nothing gives you that right!
Taking up my screen… that’s the core of the problem. On the average website, there is nothing that is important enough to be on the screen — taking up precious screen real estate — all of the time. The most important thing on any web page is the content, and things like this obscure that content from the visitor.
This little toolbar, which takes up about 5% of the viewing area on my laptop, provides quick access to functions that I am never going to use. It is wasting bandwidth and my monitor space, doing nothing to make my experience any better. It makes it so I cannot see as much of the content on the page, which is the real reason that I am visiting your website (not your fancy Javascript).
These negatives are why frames disappeared from existence and why you should ignore this trend. It will disappear. I promise.
Just to recap:
- Content: good. Things that obscure content: Bad.
- Your website doesn’t have enough functionality to warrant a position:fixed toolbar. Facebook does, you don’t.
- These widgets are bringing back techniques that were left behind with HTML frames. Techniques that were abandoned for good reason.
- Random is good for breaking passwords, not magically making your website stickier.
I’ve always heard that history repeats itself, but I didn’t think I’d be able to witness it happening right before my eyes! I really hope that we don’t have to experience all the negatives of web 1.0 in this new 2.0 world and beyond…
The first commandment of web design: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Hate to be a bugger, but I noticed that while you post the XHTML 1.0 Transitional logo at the bottom of your page, there are actually two errors, at least on this page. Minor detail, but I’ve tested some free web page reader plugins that break on markup errors, thus obscuring your precious content. As far as toolbars go, I like them … sometimes. And when I don’t there are, at least in this example, little arrows that you click to reduce the size of the content obscuring rascal to almost nothing. I actually wish more sites had fixed navigation menus, especially ones with long articles, to eliminate scrolling back through the whole site to figure out if there is something else I’d like to see. Fixed navigation bars are much nicer than frames are concerned, at least from an accessibility perspective. I’ll agree though that we could heap a few more piles of dirt on the grave that frames lie in.
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Cory reply on January 7th, 2010 20.19.30:
Thanks for the note about the errors. That logo is actually part of the theme that I use (that I didn’t design). I’m guessing the errors that you speak of are in the actual post HTML code?
For me, getting back to the menu at the top of the page (by pressing the home key) is much easier than having access to a fixed nav bar. I’d much rather have that extra line of reading room on my screen than a toolbar.
Perhaps if they auto-hid themselves like the windows taskbar, I would not be as against them. Until something like that happens… I’m classifying these toolbars in the same vein as the splash screen and the under construction page.
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Cody Schneider reply on January 8th, 2010 18.55.24:
Actually auto-hide wouldn’t be that hard to do with a bit of jQuery magic. I’m too lazy to write code right now, but it would be roughly 10 lines of code.
In response to your dis on under construction pages, I thought you might be interested in this link:
http://www.mikesfreegifs.com/main4/underconstruction/anileadr.gif
It’s the best. Not only is it the coolest under construction notice ever, but it’s an animated GIF! Talk about old skool awesomeness.
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Nice article Cody – you make some great points. I came across your post while trying to figure out why website toolbars that offer virtually no discernible value to the user are suddenly everywhere. No luck so far but I’m really hoping it’s not ‘because we can’.
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Came across your site searching for whether a toolbar is a good or bad idea (what web developers and designers think). And I agree 100% it is a bad idea. I may have 1920×1200 display but that doesn’t mean I want useless stuff taking up the screen. Even Facebook’s toolbar is now just the chat tabs, simple.
The problem is we ARE going to see it more for a bit unless people get some sense. The reason: the push for social networking. Of course Facebook helps generate traffic for a few of my sites, so I am sort of forced into this mess. I generally dislike this idea of ‘I like/use X, therefore I must tell the world’. It is off the scale for stupidity. If I like something, I tell my friends who are people in REAL LIFE who talk to often, not some random acquaintance and therefore is on my Facebook ‘friends’ list.
So far I have Adblock’d two: SKYbar and Wibiya. These filters do the trick:
|http://*skysa.com/*
|http://*wibiya.com/*
Also, block CNET’s bar:
|http://*/cnetToolbar/*
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