I’ve realized that a bit of this was ‘milking it’ and just general hateful ranting, so I’ve removed those bits. It was wrong of me to do that.
Also, they have recently taken the site offline for a redesign. It was apparently created in an hour or two, so it’ll be interesting to see what it eventually looks like. It wasn’t so much a bad design (besides other issues all over) as it was an unfinished design.
Site link removed. He’s changing it, so there’s nothing to see there right now.
Wow, that’s probably about the worst web design site I’ve ever seen.
I’ll step you through it:
- The links are completely ordinary. No color, no font, no shape or size difference. It makes me feel like walking into a house where they’re still painting and the living room is full of boxes.
- Tables. Okay, so that’s not all that bad, in certain times, if you’re lazy. However:
- Tables. And tables. They actually have a table containing their footer in another table containing everything else. It’s like they imagine they should be using not just cells, but whole tables for every element.
- No styles. The bullet lists are plain, the background is white, with no splash of colour anywhere. I mentioned someplace that hadn’t finished painting. Instead, it’s more like the walls were gyprock without drywall.
- No stylesheet styles. The CSS stylesheet has a single rule in it, and all the other styles (some padding around the links) are all inline, which goes against most of what CSS stands for.
- On their Contact Us page, they mention three cities and then put a Google Maps picture of those cities below. Each of those pictures is a whopping 650 pixels wide, at over 300KB for the lot, and are then constrained to be 30% their size. You never see over two thirds of the picture, but you’re still downloading it.
- After all this, they ask $35/$50 per hour.
I decided randomly to check out my competition in Winnipeg. One site is amazing, and I was thinking of how I’d have done what he did with jQuery, but then I realized he was using flash. Also, music came on unexpectedly, and I had to search through my tabs to find out what was doing it.
There was another, http://www.designedconsulting.ca/
I’m linking because it’s actually very beautiful. They use Mootools to transition between their main page elements, and there’s not a single table in the whole place. The design looks to be a bit cumbersome, with strange divs everywhere (according to the comments, to fix IE float bugs). Their layout is just a bit stacked, because it seems like they have three different pages on top of one-another. It reminds me of the first web-page I did, where it was a series of boxes and you’d just scroll down to get to the next ‘page’.
Even through that, though, they have some amazing sample designs.
You know what? I feel a difference in the animation between mootools and jQuery. Mootools uses something much more even and gradual, while jQuery seems to follow an acceleration curve.
Joomla is on my next-to-learn list, because I’ve seen it around a few places. I still don’t know what a Content Management System is, so I’m looking at that right now.