Email conversation
| From | David Hardwick |
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| To | Me |
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| Subject | Bad site design sujestion: [URL] |
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| Date | 8 February 2008 03:42 |
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I have looked at your bad website section on your site, and i think this
should be included.
[URL]
Why?
a) Yellow Background, need i say more?
b) White background images showing off there 'latest offers'
c) Blue contact numbers, Red text, and a bulk text of all the local towns
and villages in the area
d) There logo is basically a poor Word-art image done badly.
e) looking at the source makes me laugh,
<meta name="generator" content="Yahoo! SiteBuilder/2.5/1.5.0_02">
<!-- text below generated by server. PLEASE REMOVE -->
Need I carry on?
I personally have spoken to the site owner and have made an offer that
I personally make a website for them as the one is so poor.
Looking forward to hear a reply.
David.
| From | Me |
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| To | David Hardwick |
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| Subject | Re: Bad site design sujestion: [URL] |
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| Date | 9 February 2008 09:32 |
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David,
> a) Yellow Background, need i say more?
Ouch, but then again, my old design for my site was equally hideous.
> c) Blue contact numbers, Red text, and a bulk text of all the local towns
> and villages in the area
Search engine optimising, the lame way. Not impressive at all.
> d) There logo is basically a poor Word-art image done badly.
Sure, a lot of sites do this. What is much worse, by far, is the alt text
they have used for the images. It never matches what is written on the
image, or is relevant.
For example, the image of the word "Home" has the alt text "Laptops & PC's
at Keen Prices" instead of just "Home" like it should be. The logo graphic
has no alt text, when it should say the same as the text on the graphic.
Then there are the advert images, which I think are probably the images of
their fliers. They have loads of text on the image, the majority of the
page's text, but no alt text (but they are not background images, at least).
Then the real gem, the "Virus Help While U Wait" - the alt text for that is
a few keywords relating to computers, then the list of local towns again.
Some of this is obviously done because of a bug in IE, where it uses alt
attribute as a tooltip, instead of only using the title attribute. Authors
do not realise they are abusing it, so they use the wrong one to make
tooltips. Screen readers do not stand a chance on sites like this, that are
made to work with that bug.
> e) looking at the source makes me laugh,
>
> <meta name="generator" content="Yahoo! SiteBuilder/2.5/1.5.0_02">
> <!-- text below generated by server. PLEASE REMOVE -->
You missed my personal favourite. See the body tag. It does not end where it
should end, and instead it contains the HTML encoded markup of all the link
and meta tags from the HEAD, written inside the body tag. It is almost like
they are debugging (it was also written inside a comment earlier), and
didn't know where they were putting the debugging output.
Yes, this site is a good example of what not to do. It is absolutely awful,
and in need of a proper rewrite. Good luck.
Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/