The Daily Sucker

Site: Austin City Limits

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I first got turned on to the TV show Austin City Limits (ACL) when I was living in, logically enough, Austin, Texas (a town I still miss). One of the most amazing shows I watched featured Leonard Cohen — which is really surprising because before that show I hated his music. However, his performance that night was jaw-dropping (in the good sense). Years later, I remembered that ACL had a list of performers on their web site and I wanted to track down information about his appearance and dig up the song list.

I hadn’t been to ACL’s web site in years and when I went there I discovered the ACL home page is terrible. Typical music site black background with red links you can’t read. The Schedule page is a contrast disaster, especially with the small type. Concerning the contrast issue,. AccessColor said that:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 10.89% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 88.71% of the total the text.

The only information I could find about Cohen’s performance was on the Artist Anthology page (which also sucks). He appeared on ACL in 1989. To get the set list, I had to search the Internet. The show started off with “First we take Manhattan.” No wonder the show was great.

There are lots of problems with the ACL site. When I went to the page about Jakob Dylan’s performance and clicked on a picture, two windows opened up in IE7. The site also isn’t easy to navigate.

ACL is a national treasure and the site is a dump. ACL deserves much, much better.

Austin City Limits

Site: CHEO Complimentary Health Education

Submitter’s comments: Especially check out the ‘members’ link and what you get when it is clicked.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: They don’t seem able to make up their mind about what kind of text they want to use. We have centered text, flush left text, italic mixed with regular, different font sizes, all cap letters, bold text, different font faces, etc. Basically, we have ADHD typography.

CHEO Complimentary Health Education

Site: Aaron Connor Photography

Submitter’s comments: I thought a photographer would have at least a little sense in good design.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: NOTE: He cleaned up his site enough so that it wouldn’t make the Daily Sucker. This picture of the original site shows you why it qualified.

Once again, we have a site where it looks like the person/company provides a superior product, but their sucky web site destroys credibility.

The site looks especially bad on a wide-screen (1920 x 1200) monitor (1.8Mb), the TITLE tag for the home page is “index,” we have scrolling yellow text on a red divider bar, multiple-colored text, text that runs to the edge of the screen along with text that doesn’t, a terrible logo, and at least one image that isn’t a link (while the others in the group are links), and the only link on a subpage is to the home page.

Aaron Connor Photography

Site: Monkey Bars

Submitter’s comments: I would like to humbly submit this site that I just had the misfortune to actively visit.

Sucky things that I noticed right off the bat:

1 - The site is merely a frame - the actual content comes from an entirely different domain - have they not heard of SEO optimization, accessibility, etc.? When you finally get to the original source code it’s a horrible jumble of inline styles and deprecated html.

2 - It’s Flash - WHY? as a result each page takes several seconds to load - and has a nauseating loading effect in the bargain.

3 - The menu is so slick the designers haven’t even noticed that two of the menu items have cut-off text.

4 - The conveniently underlined email address in the top banner isn’t actually clickable.

5 - Under “Centre Info” there is some detail about to get there - how about a map?

6 - Going to http://monkeybars.com.au just fails to load anything at all - redirects aren’t that hard, especially when you might be losing half your potential business.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I’d like to comment using the references above.

1. The site is using the free Flash web site builder called Wix. The code is “spooky,” but I just recently looked at Google’s home page and their code is even spookier. I’m going to be discussing this topic next month.

2. I agree. Why?

3. I find it difficult to believe anyone can make this mistake. In addition, the page marker is even more horrible.

4. This might actually be OK — assuming they’re using this technique to hide their email address from spammers.

5. I agree. Perhaps they could have a link to a map.

6. Sigh. So many big organizations make this mistake. Harvard University made it until I pointed it out.

Monkey Bars

Site: Rev. John Giunta

Submitter’s comments: I saw this and I thought of you. Ropy contrast, image files 10 times larger than they need to be, seizure-inducing scrolling text, inconsistent backgrounds on sub-pages, badly organised link lists. And a rather scary mugshot.

I’m sure John Giunta is a very committed and talented man, but his web site…

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Speaking of images, the Crafts page is 1,471,144 bytes. We also have IE transitions, boxes around graphics links, inconsistent sub-navigation (sometimes on top; sometimes on bottom), all sorts of text discrepancies (centered, flush-left, large, small, etc.), the reading list page is broken, etc.

Oh. We also have contrast issues on the home page. AccessColor says that “Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 55.62% of the total the text.”

Nice URL, though.

Rev. John Giunta