Um...they paid for it?

[selenay]

My lovely father asked me to have a look at his company website two weeks ago and I finally got around to popping in.

Um.

Er.

He paid someone for that? ::shudder:: The site that I redesigned a couple of months ago was, admittedly, a little worse, but not a huge amount worse. This one, though, I wouldn't know where to begin with. The visual design isn't too bad, I guess, but the back-end...

It breaks if you resize it - good thing IE won't let you resize it. Except it's 10pt Arial (er, mostly, almost) and on larger monitors it needs to be resized. There is a pointless Flash animation on the resources page that has absolutely no relevance to the business. Tons of extra code that serves no point whatsover. And don't get me started on the incomprehensible scripts and IE's intense desire to start doing *something* every five seconds, except it doesn't know what it wants to do...

I didn't break the news gently. He knows me better than that :-) Hope he's not feeling too bad about having paid for that piece of crappy uselessness.

In other news, I have 15 Doctor Who icons (yay!) to be uploaded this weekend. And five recs. And I am going out for Thai food with terrylbirch this evening. And the Tour de France begins tomorrow. And I have money to buy a new watch thanks to lovely family feeling generous at my graduation. And the only things that I have planned this weekend are watch buying, Tour watching and lots of writing. Yay!

Comments

[paranoidangel]

I think there must be something about professional web designers. The company I work for paid someone to do theirs and it's crap - although better than the previous one, but believe me, it's really not that hard.

My parents' work paid someone to do theirs and it was one of the worst I have ever seen.

[gmul.livejournal.com]

I have some pet theories on this based on observations of a number of companies and from different angles. I don't think it's professional web designers who are (generally) the problem.

It all seems to go wrong when you have print designers who also do web stuff. These often seem to try and turn the web in to a fixed entity, as if it were paper. Hence the issues with non-resizing, browser incompatibility, lack of accessibility and so on. They may throw in the odd bit of animation to appear hip.

These sorts of designer would die out owing to lack of clue if it wasn't for the fact that they tend to be commissioned by people in marketing departments who also don't know thing one about the web.

I am obviously not including the web sites put together by the 12 year old offspring of the MD either.

[paranoidangel]

That's a good theory. I think part of it is the people in charge thinking they want all sorts of things, but as they don't know the web very well, don't realise how bad an idea it is. And the designers obviously aren't pointing this out well enough.

[selenay]

*sigh* Sadly, my father who knows something about the Web (and has this handy daughter who knows even more) isn't in charge of the marketing. He's promised never to introduce me to the marketing manager - I think he's afraid that I'll kill her.

The fearless web designer in charge of the site is...the marketing manager's brother. And he obviously hasn't got a clue. Gah. Da will be instructing the partner who is boss of the marketing manager that this is not an acceptable state of affairs.

I think the major problem here is that nobody knows quite what they want, the marketing manager is clueless and the web designer is attempting to make a fast buck off the back of it. Not the best combination. Bleh.

[paranoidangel]

Not the best combination.

Definitely. I had a summer job creating a web site for a company. The bloke in charge (big boss of some description) knew they wanted a web site but not really why. Or what he wanted on it. And didn't really understand what it could be used for either (he asked me, at one point, to print it out in order).

[selenay]

I think that's one of the principle problems with Da's thing. They kinda know what they want to acheive and my father actually has some good ideas, but nobody really knows what they want on the site and why. One of the original concepts, five years ago, was that the website needs to be fun.

Um.

They're accountants. Yes, it's definitely not a good idea to look stuff-shirt-ish and dull, but the "fun" touches that have been added to the site just make it look amateurish. Not the company that anyone wants to entrust their finances to.

A lot of people have trouble switching between the expectations of a print production and a website - I swear that's the cause of half the bad websites out there. I've been battling it to a degree on the Quaker thing. Drives you up the wall :-)