I enjoy the Bill Detwiler "Cracking Open" articles, but...
I enjoy these "Cracking Open" galleries. I'm a tinkerer so I've been exploring "how things work" since I was a small boy. I've taken apart plenty of laptops out of necessity in the course of my IT profession. I have also designed a few websites and learned enough to know a badly designed website when I see one. The layout of the Tech Republic site is not the issue, it's the user experience. Whenever I tune in to look at one of these gallery of pictures articles I get a few pics in and quickly get annoyed and frustrated. Maybe it's my slow internet connection, but the way the content jumps around as the banner ads load makes the gallery experience unbearable. Here's the scenario:
You follow a link to the page and scroll to begin to read an article or look at a picture. Then the content drops a quarter of an inch as the banner ad begins to load. If you were reading text, it throws you off and you have to find your place again. Begin reading again and after another second or two the content drops an inch more as the banner ad pops in at full height. Now you have to scroll to find your place again. If it's a gallery of pictures it's even worse because each time you click to view the next slide, the whole jumpy process starts over again. The entire page reloads, you are put back at the top of the page, you must scroll scroll again, and just as you are about to look at the picture or read the caption, it jumps down an inch and you must scroll again.
This is "Tech" Republic. Have you not heard of "ScrollTo" or better yet AJAX? Reloading the whole page just to change an image at this stage in web development is shameful. Or how about bringing up the gallery of pictures in a modal popup?
Is it just me or have other users experienced this?
