Why is it that Mexican web designers feel compelled to use so much Flash on their web sites? It drives me nuts. They often think nothing of putting entire pages in Flash. Are they allergic to plain text? Are they THAT naive about the accessibility and usability problems associated with Flash? In a country where most people can’t afford a computer they expect that everyone who visits their site will have the Flash player installed? Do they care that little about page load times or whether their sites indexed properly by search engines?

Take, for example, the web site for the radio show “Mexico Today“. The whole page is Flash, you can’t even select the blog entry text. I tried Googling for the show and, not surprisingly, I couldn’t find it.

The very liberal newspaper “La Jornada” is a little better, at least the arcticle text is actually text. But this morning when I visited it the home page had no less than 7 Flash movies, all of which were moving. Even one moving thing on a page is enough to scare away some users. Personally I find all that movement completely distracts me from actually reading the content. And on top of that the page is slow to load.

The purpose of a web page is to provide something that the user needs; so the user’s experience of the page should be of paramount importance. It should not be about web designer’s Flash abilities, it should be about the users!

My neighbors are promising to keep me up much too late tonight because they are very noisily hanging Christmas lights all over their house right now. For some reason it’s taking 6 very loud and talkative people to hang a few lights and throw some plastic Christmas decorations around the yard. I don’t get that. I also don’t get why they bother with doing all this when they STILL haven’t taken down the plywood which they put up over their windows in preparation for Hurricane Emily (which hit us in July). Hello? Your house looks lovely decked out with fake snow and plastic Santas, and by-the-way the lights really set off your plywood window dressings…

People are so weird. Which is ok. I just wish they could learn to be weird QUIETLY.

Cancun’s streets are a mess right now. Worse than the usual pot-holed, twisty, chaotic mess that is Cancun’s street system. (Whomever designed the street layout here must have had lots of connections, because they sure didn’t have any city planning experience!)

Whenever it rains hard here the roads instantly develop tire-eating pot holes. Tropical storm Stan positively wrecked the roads here. And then just a few days later we got hit by Hurricane Wilma. Now the roads are almost impassable in some places. And on top of that Wilma knocked down all the streetlights in the city.

Driving in Cancun right now makes driving in Boston seem easy!

As a web designer I spend a lot of time thinking about web usability, that is, the best way to display web content to users. And one of the conclusions I reached long ago is that “Under Construction” pages are a huge waste of time. If it’s not done don’t bother telling your users about it. They do not want to see the pages you are planning to put up on your site, some day, maybe. They are not interested in your ambitions, just your content. They want to find the information they are seeking. They don’t care about your process; they care about their own experience.

I’ve wanted to start blogging for several years, so now I’m doing it. But the reason I’m doing it RIGHT NOW is that it’s finally time for me to get my shit together as a web designer and learn how some of these blog packages work. So this site is my guinea pig. I’ll try my best to only improve your user experience, but I will be fucking around with it a lot and there may be times when I screw it up royally. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

…all nine (9) of them. When we came to Cancun two and a half years ago we had two old-lady cats. After we got familiar with Cancun we began to see the extent of the street cat problem here. We decided to start catching and neutering street cats. In the process of doing that we ended up adopting a whole bunch of them…

Hey, I’m RiverGirl and this is where I write about my life and my work. I am an American, I live in Cancun, Mexico with my husband, my daughter and a whole lot of cats.

I am a web designer and a graphic artist. I run HiddenCancun.com, which is a travel site dedicated to Cancun and the Riviera Maya. I also run Magnolia Web Studio, a full service web and graphic design studio.

I am a computer junkie. I once owned a computer store, back before Dell took over the world. I started using computers to make art when I was in college back in the late ’80’s (now you know how old I am). When I die I want to be uploaded to the internet.

Thanks for reading!