Of course, most of them were property sites and rental sites, cashing in on a temporary boom. If visitors were looking for something definite, they could cope with the most amateurish of sites.

The property boom is over, especially for British expatriates, with the pound approaching parity with the euro. We really need to move on from sites built from templates, and sites built by teenagers in love with Flash.

So why do we have sites as fundamentally dreadful as the site for the “Iceland” shops in expatriate Spain?

The shop is fine
I shop frequently at my local “Iceland”, in Benissa. It is a fine shop, with produce shipped in every day from Britain. It has a fantastic English butcher, a serious range of frozen ready meals, and bottled real ale, like Hobgoblin and Bishops Finger. So I have nothing whatsoever against the company.

The site is shameful
It’s just their Web site which is so awful. If you have ever read a post in this blog, you will know that Web site design begins with thinking about visitors. It is an extension of researched marketing. It is not about the scenery.

Before they take it down, have a look at their page which tells you where their shops are.

What does any visitor want from such a page, at a bare minimum? Opening hours would be good. I can’t find them anywhere on the site. Next, a visitor will want to know where their nearest shop is, and how to get to it. This should be the page to do it. Just take a despairing look.

At the top it says, Below you will find details on Overseas Imports stores located in Tenerife. We are currently expanding our business to mainland Spain, so expect more addresses to be added here shortly. Since there are half a dozen shops in mainland Spain on the page, you would have expected the company (someone paid them to do the design) at least to rewrite this sentence.

The real crime, however, is their map. This is designer-centred design so bad it has to be called ‘teenage design.’ It aims to impress rather than inform—and it doesn’t inform at all. The tiny maps in the circles are of no use. Who could drive anywhere using them? In the case of the Benissa shop, they have a bit of a map which shows an area which is half an hour’s drive from the shop—and the arrow is pointing to a crazy spot on the main map.

If you look at the other pages, you will see graphics-free text pages with lines stretching across the page. And then this page, which uses huge static graphics. Google maps, with a simple enough API for real Web site designers, are free. I use them on almost all my expatriate Spain sites. I just can’t work out where the Web site design company responsible for the “Iceland” site is coming from.

In expatriate Spain, we are having a hard enough time. We deserve better from our Web site designers.

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…

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.

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.

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.

Of course, as any English speaker will spot immediately, there’s a mistake. ‘Trouble’, at least in this context, is not a countable noun, like ‘eye’ or ‘mistake’. It’s what linguists call a “mass”, or uncountable noun. (Think of ‘love’, which is not countable, and ‘kisses’—which are.) You can’t have ‘a’ trouble focusing.

I mentioned a few days ago that there are close on a million native English-speakers here in Spain. So why didn’t the bank—or the copywriters—run the text past one of them? Any English-speaker would spot the mistake instantly, without any special linguistic knowledge. They would just know that it “wasn’t right.”

I’m sure this sort of thing happens all over the world, wherever a native institution displays something in what, for it, is a foreign language. But you wouldn’t expect it on the Web page of a major institution here in Spain, when you could wander out into the street and find someone who spoke the relevant language.

Extraño, ¿no?

There are several English bookshops, but far and away the best—for my money—is the Librería Europa in Calpe, run by Gil. He can order just about any book you’ve ever heard of—and he is an ace at tracking down books which are out of print.

Gil is a character in his own right, so the bookshop—just off Calpe’s main shopping street—is definitely worth a visit. For further details you can check out the Librería Europa website.