There’s something that’s been niggling away at me for a while now. What the hell is it with websites with deliberately shitty gallery navigation.
Primary offender: Worthplaying.com. It’s a good site, plenty of information, good reviews, previews and updates. But, goddamnit, click on an image thumbnail and a new window opens to display it. That’s not the problem. But you can’t advance to the next or previous image from that new window. Ooooh no. You have to close the window and click on the next thumbnail instead.
An oversight perhaps?
Unlikely. The thumbnail links use javascript:void instructions so the boffins know what they’re doing and they know that using such a method defeats the convenience of tabbed browsing too.
Now, I can understand if you have major exclusive and you don’t want kids hotlinking to your images and stealing your bandwidth. Just make the gallery Flash based or something. But Worthplaying clearly isn’t too fussed with that and they also watermark all their images.
So, please, someone explain the mentality of deliberately making your large, sprawling, multimedia website a right bloody pain to navigate – seemingly for the sheer hell of it.
Footnote: This post sounds better if you imagine an exasperated John Cleese is saying it.