Tim Flight

Today I had the opportunity to view a newly opened website which I had bid on constructing but had lost the bid. I lost the bid by a wide margin and didn’t know much about the person/firm who won the bid. Of course it is easy for me to be critical about someone else’s work, especially since they got the job and I didn’t… but the site was simply terrible.

For starters the site was aesthetically unappealing. The graphics all had jagged edges. There were links scattered all around the page, but no central location of links. The link locations were not consistent across all of the pages. There were misspellings. The content was difficult to read on the repeating background image. There were numerous errors in the HTML code that prevented the layout from working as designed in at least my browser. The ‘Contact Us’ form had no underlying CGI, just a mailto action. Email addresses were spread over the site ready for email harvesters to scoop them up. There was no sense of keyword optimization. And I got a nice flashback to the early nineties when I saw the odometer style “hit counter” at the bottom of the page.

But what made this site truly terrible was the images. Someone had taken high-res digital photographs of the company and they were never compressed before adding them to the website. So ONE page on the website was 4.06MB! What does that mean? Well for someone on a dial-up modem connection that page will take 850 seconds (almost fifteen minutes) to load.

So who am I to tell him his website is nearly worthless? (He is an acquaintance beyond just potential client.) Who knows, maybe he won’t notice any of those things… He has a high-speed internet connection so he won’t notice the fact that people with modems can’t really use his site. Will he understand how bad the rest of the site is? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I think most will agree that the site is not beautiful. He will eventually notice an increase in spam, but will he attribute it to the website or will he think “that’s just what happens” not knowing that he could have a contact form with a CGI script that emails the result without revealing his email address. Will he think my analysis is a slap in the face? Friends don’t let friends have really bad websites… Comments appreciated!

This entry was posted on Friday, November 19th, 2004 at 11:51 pm and is filed under My Works. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.