Web Log Costa Blanca

When I wrote a whimsical piece on this topic on the 26th of August I had no idea that, in October, rains would bring devastation to the Costa Blanca—or the part of it where I live. Storms and floods destroyed cars, brought down a bridge, savaged buildings and wrecked entire beaches. The precipitation may have been as high as 400 litres per square metre, in 24 hours. The area was officially declared a disaster zone, the Vice-President came to see the damage, and for days the rains were the main item of news on Spanish TV.

A friend of mine had to swim out of the ground-floor of his apartment block into his garage, where he found his car submerged in water. It had been a new car; it was now a complete write-off.

For some really revealing photos, have a look at the webshots.com album put together by Chris Young (from which I have borrowed my tiny thumbnail).

And where was I while all this rain was falling? In Manchester. (Yes, the irony is a little oppressive.)

However, I did get the start of it. It had been bucketing down all night when I got up on Friday to go to the airport. Since I was staying for a while, I’d decided to go by coach, and had ordered a taxi. It never came. When I telephoned, the dispatcher said it was impossible for a taxi to get to my urbanisation, because of the water. (more…)

A last few words about fonts, before I move on to images.

Just yesterday, a new client wrote to me about my first design for their property development site: “The letters of the text are a little thin, could you please make them thicker in general, it will be easier to read I suppose?”

As it happens, her eyes were spot on. I had tried the experiment of calling first for elegant Century Gothic. This is not one of the fonts guaranteed to be on every visitor’s machine—but it’s on enough of them for me to take the chance. (I’m so tired of Verdana/Geneva and Arial/Helvetica.) She evidently had the font on her machine.

My response was of course to switch to nice chunky Verdana—again. But I pondered on the assumptions behind her request. She is a partner in a big Russian property development company operating here in Spain, and they have obviously commissioned many print designers. She clearly thought I had the kind of control over fonts that a print designer takes for granted.

And why don’t I? How come Firefox and the Mozilla project are so stand-offish about embedded fonts? There is even an ‘at-rule’ in CSS (@font-face) which is supposed to allow developers to embed fonts. The Mozilla project scorns it.

Why? To go back to an earlier post of mine, my guess is that they are all principled introverts who think that questions of visual display are beneath their notice.

If only there were a few visually stimulated extroverts on the project…

In 2001, when I first came to live in my present house in Calpe, the hill across the valley to the east was a sandy brown. A desert hill, which made you wonder what had ever been grown on its ancient stone terraces.

It seems there was very little rain in Calpe in the 1990s—and I know there was a drought all through Spain. I visited Madrid two or three times a year in that decade, and travelled around much of Spain. (Of course I spoke much better Spanish then, before I came to settle among expats.)

Torrential rains came in October 2001, and have been coming back—several times a year—ever since. I’ve heard that the Jet Stream is going to bring warmer weather in September and October, but it’s been raining through much of August this year. We blamed the drought on global warming; no doubt it’s responsible for all the extra rain too. Whatever the reason, the result has been to turn the Costa Blanca green.

Now there is a green hill, and it’s not far away (as in the hymn). It’s just across the valley from me.

It gets worse.

I thought yesterday’s post might be of some interest to the people who publish the Bulletin. I checked their Web site, and could find no e-mail address—in 2007, no e-mail address?—just a contact form. I’ve included it (scaled down) below, so you can see what I am talking about.

I duly entered my personal name and family name, etc. After the four identifying fields there is a bigger area labelled ‘Subject’. Odd label, I thought. This is normally used for a subject field, not a message field—but I didn’t want to be picky. I entered my message in the field, and clicked on the icon labelled ‘Submit.’ And what happened?

A message appeared in the ‘Status’ field saying “Subject Required !”

This happened no matter what I entered in any field. I could not submit the form. Have a go yourself, if you don’t believe me: www.costablanca-bulletin.com. (I can’t direct you straight to the form, since it’s a Flash site, and they make all the elementary errors designers usually make with Flash sites, like not letting you identify individual pages.)

Looking at the design, my guess is that they meant to include a proper ‘Subject’ field, but overlooked it, then gave the message field an internal id such as message, while labelling it ‘Subject’ for the visitor.

As for the error message, its curtness would be unforgivable even if I had been responsible for the error. It unerringly betrays the untrained amateur—someone who thinks that Web design is about HTML and pretty pictures, rather than about designing systems for people.

This unusable form is worse than the playground-style rudeness I identified (in another site) yesterday. It shows a fundamental lack of respect for visitors on the part of the site owners—and ignorance of elementary testing procedures on the part of the designers.

One of the things I do every now and then is check out the Web sites listed in Costa Blanca publications. Some of you may have come across the free booklet called the Bulletin, which comes out once a year, and covers Altea, Benissa, Jalón, Teulada, Moraira and Calpe. There is some handy information in it, such as bus times from Calpe to the airport. (I picked up my 2007 copy recently, when I renewed my car and house insurance.)

Its own Web site is a Flash site, with a PDF copy of the printed booklet. Some thought has gone into the design, and I personally find it quite attractive—if it weren’t for the flashing text. This has been a no-no, condemned by every serious designer, since the early 1990s. It is a great pity, since it detracts from the professionalism of the site.

What really upset me, however, was the low standard of most of the Web sites listed in the publication. One of the motivations for this blog is to collaborate with other local designers in raising awareness of good design principles, for our sake and for our clients’ sake.

I may comment some more on particular sites in later posts, but one thing has to be mentioned immediately. It is unforgivable to make unfinished pages public. One site listed in the Bulletin is in German. It has little flags which link to English and Spanish versions—or rather don’t. The links go nowhere. This is an insult to visitors—like offering a handshake and then tripping the other person up, as children do on playgrounds. It also suggests the company is disorganised and amateurish.

Maybe the site owner is too busy to produce the necessary pages, or has been let down by someone else. Fine. Just keep the flags off the pages—until the pages that the flags promise are ready.

When I first came to Spain, in the summer of 1967, I used to play football with some Spanish lads on the deserted beaches of Gandia and Dénia. Over the years, I saw things change (you wouldn’t find either beach deserted now). The biggest changes, however, seem to be happening in this century.

I came to live on the Costa Blanca six years ago, in a house some one hundred metres up a steep hill, about five kilometres from the centre of Calpe. I used to drive to my house through vineyards, round hills with ancient terraces, and up and down an empty valley in which the only building was a ruined farmhouse.

In 2007, I drive through houses. There are rows of terraced houses where there used to be vineyards. There are houses out of a Renaissance Italian painting right up what used to be terraced hills. There are houses in the valley.

The odd thing is, I see so few people around these houses. There are so few lights on at night. The obvious answer is that they are being bought by foreigners and Madrileños who only come here in the summer. So why are there so few signs of life in the middle of August?

The pattern is repeated in the centre of Calpe. Huge skyscrapers have gone up—but at the height of the summer, only a few windows twinkle. Entire floors are black. And the town streets are quiet. Business picks up a bit in August, but there is no sign of a huge influx of population.

I’d love to know who has bought these empty houses. If they have been bought by speculators, isn’t there a real risk of supply exceeding demand? Or has anyone bought them? Is the whole enterprise just a way of laundering drug money?

Anyone with inside knowledge is welcome to comment.

Just yesterday, in a supermarket, I witnessed something I’ve seen dozens of times, but which never fails to astonish me.

A man, of about my own age, needed to pass through a queue. “Excuse me,” he said.

If I’d been in Basingstoke or Hull, nothing could have been more normal. But I wasn’t. I was here on the Costa Blanca. This was a Spanish supermarket, and the queue was made up of the usual motley group of Spaniards and expatriates. The man had absolutely no reason for supposing that any of them were English.

I’ve also heard expatriates—German and French as well as English—reply in their own language when the long-suffering girl on the till spoke to them in Spanish. I don’t know what makes these monolinguists tick. From the looks on their faces, it’s as though they can’t really believe that there really are foreign languages. Their own language is so natural to them, they can’t face the fact that it’s just one among many. Surely, their faces seem to say, everyone must understand the only language I speak.

I’m not talking about casual holiday-makers. I’m talking about the expatriate population.

Ah well, let’s end on a positive note. If you want to know the politest way to say “Excuse me” in Spanish, it’s “¿Con permiso?” It’s a question, and you say it the same way you’d say “May I?” in English. So you wait for an answer. A polite Spaniard will immediately say, “Si”, and move aside for you.

Of course, if you say it to another monolingual expat… Sigh.

The girls who make the cold calls are always certain there will be no problems. The engineers who turn up always say it’s impossible.

The Internet has redefined “the countryside”. It is no longer a place where farmers grow crops, or the unspeakable pretend to be hunting the uneatable.

In the early twenty-first century, wherever you live on the planet, you live in the countryside if you live too far from a relay station to get broadband.

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.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, sorry for the four days without posts. Because of some worries about my heart, I have been in hospital, in Benidorm.

I am back at work now, and full of ideas.