It's downright awful and I'm having a hard time imagining the author proof reading their own page and thinking "yeah, that's great".

As an aside, I have an article in my blog that has GIFs in it, and they're important for the content, but I'm not a frontend developer by any stretch of the imagination so I'm really at wit's end for how to make it so that the GIFs only play on mouse hover or something else. If anybody reading has some tips, I'd love to hear them. I'm using Zola static site generator, and all I've done is make minor HTML and CSS tweaks, so I really have no idea what I'm doing where it concerns frontend presentation.

Probably the only way to do this is to convert the gifs to an actual video, and add some js that will unpause/pause on mousein/mouseout and touchstart/touchend