This weekend a sub-group in the parish launched a web site for the village. I don't know the people involved, but I do know that the village has a number of IT consultants and new-media people who work up in London and along the Thames Valley, so there is no shortage of actual skill in the village.
The web site is funded by money from the small business association, and I believe the Parish Council coughed some money up, so I think they did have some kind of budget - though I do intend to find out how much.
The web site is hosted on a BSD box and runs Apache, which is about the best thing I can say about the site, alas it's about the only good thing to say about the site.
Ignoring the look and feel, which I think is awful, but others may like, it's a FrontPage monstrosity. The pages are huge bulky low grade non-standard mark-up, with a gigantic and utterly diabolical style sheet, and poor quality un-optimised graphics littered about like confetti.
My better half sent them a very polite email saying that there were a lot of poor design choices, and that with a little care, things could be improved. She was much more forgiving that I would have been, and was doing her best to be constructive, and helpful. She was rebuffed by someone who clearly didn't understand a word of what she had said.
Re:Hmmm....
ajt on 2003-11-26T11:58:38
It's quite bad, I don't really know where to start...
I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, someone has put a some effort in, but it's all for nothing. They clearly don't know what they are doing, and all that FrontPage has done has allowed them to take disorganised thought, and produce a poorly coded, disorganised site.
If they used proper tools the site would be cleaner, and thus render faster. Going forward it would be easier to maintain, which saves money, important as there isn't a lot to go around in a small village. My fear is that even if they used proper tools, and coded to standards, it would still be an unusable mess....
I'm going to write into the parish newsletter and my parish councillor to find out how it has been budgeted, and who's doing the work. I fear that the village mafia has bitten of more than it can chew this time.
- No visual design plan - it looks awful
- No understanding of usability - it doesn't work properly
- No understanding of long term maintenance - it's terribly coded
- No understanding of the underlying technology - did I mention the bad code?
- Clearly lots of enthusiasm - someone has got off their arse and done something
Re:Hmmm....
davorg on 2003-11-26T12:11:48
One more suggestion - you could run the site thru HTMLTidy and send them the clean version.Re:Hmmm....
ajt on 2003-11-26T13:09:01
Tidy is your friend! Even Tidy may struggle, the markup is so dire, only a Microsoft product could produce a web page that is this bad.
Plus is there CSSTidy, GIFTidy, JPEGTidy, TasteTidy.....
Interestingly the site actually looks worse on IE because it tries to do some MS voodoo that Opera and Mozilla ignore! Recently I realised that Microsoft is so incompatible with Microsoft that switching to Linux at home full time was utterly painless.
Re:Hmmm....
drhyde on 2003-12-06T18:57:17
Clearly lots of enthusiasm - someone has got off their arse and done somethingYou have to wonder whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It's a bad thing because whoever got off their arse and JFDI is a twit. It's a good thing because - well, at least something got done, and while it did indeed get done badly, actively user-hostile misdesign is so common these days that people might not even notice!
If you want to mutter at parish councillors, it will help if you can show them how such a site should be done. I haven't bothered looking at the code - and that doesn't really matter because they won't understand that anyway - but this is at least not user-hostile.
