Web design, guv’nor?
One of my favourite Web sites is Vincent Flanders’ Web Pages that Suck. He means to be provocative, so no one will agree with all his criticisms. At the same time, you can sometimes learn better design habits from analysing pages that aren’t up to scratch. One small obvious example: by looking at crowded pages where text blocks have too small a margin, you can come to appreciate the importance of white space.
In my last post I criticised one of Web Costa Blanca’s competitors for making an unfounded claim on its home page. You take all sorts of risks by criticising competitors, but since I’ve embarked on this dangerous course, I may as well carry on.
I rush to add that this is another company, and again I’m not going to name it. (Once again, you can find it easily if you are looking for hosting or Web design on the Costa Blanca.)
What do you do with a company that offers to design Web pages for you—and makes a hash of designing its own site?
The page design deals with the problem of varying screen resolutions by opting for a fixed-size, central position. (Nothing wrong with that—so does this blog!) Given that this makes for an easy life, why is their left-hand menu too big for its column, so that it obliterates the neat red borders with grey spillage? Why, if a visitor increases text size in their browser, does the big text get bigger and the small text stay the same size? Why is the page design just a set of four blocks? Why does the text run into the borders?
Behind the scenes, things get worse. There is no DOCTYPE, and all the styling is on individual items, via HTML attributes. They seem to have used a template as a base (and a dreadful template at that).
I find it difficult to understand their claim to be designers.