The Daily Sucker

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I was reading a post on a Microsoft blog about how the yet-unreleased Internet Explorer 8 passed the Web Standards Project’s Acid2 test. Hmm…Microsoft and web standards in the same sentence? One of the ADD thoughts that ran through my brain was, “Hey, go run Microsoft’s home page through AccessColor’s color contrast and brightness test.” The results will have nothing to do with web standards, just the ability to code a page in such a way that the text is readable against the background. It’s all about visual contrast.

I ran Microsoft’s home page through the analyzer and received the following results:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 62.13% of the total text.
   A Fail message is displayed next to the HTML source line.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 0.53% of the total the text.
   A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Now, I’ve never met a stupid person who worked for Microsoft (some have been a little too Lifespring-ish for my taste), so I have to ask myself, “Don’t they understand it doesn’t cost millions of dollars to make your page readable?” OK, they’re stupid.

Microsoft’s Home Page

Submitter’s comments: This is the web site for my home town of Covington, Indiana. It’s so bad that I’m going to make a donation to the town in support of a better web site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Personally, I think you should give your money to some nonprofit who can do some good. Doesn’t anybody understand the concept of visual contrast? I ran the home page through AccessColor and received the following results:

Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 15.22% of the total text.

Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 18.84% of the total the text.

We also have multi-colored divider bars, centered and flush-left text, multi-colored text, and they’ve put the date the site was last edited (March 3, 2006). Oh, and the TITLE tag for the home page is “Home,” which doesn’t help the search engines index the site.

Covington Business Association

Submitter’s comments: I’d like to make my submission to the “daily sucker”.  I think that they break just about every rule.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Not every rule, but enough to qualify as the Daily Sucker. It has a lot of the usual mistakes such as a tacky logo and poor use of color. But it also has an interesting mistake I don’t talk enough about — putting dates on your pages. The Slogans in Education page has a copyright date of 1999 right where you can see it. My initial reaction is, “It’s too old to have any value. I’m not going to read it.” If you have to put a copyright date on a page, then put it at the bottom of the page or say, “Copyright 1999-2007.”

Somebody should write a little Javascript program that outputs, “Last edited XX-XX-XXXX,” where the date is a random date that’s between 5-30 days before today’s date. It would be nice if the Javascript were obfuscated so if someone looked at the source code, you couldn’t tell exactly what the Javascript did.

New Foundations

Submitter’s comments: I have been researching competitors’ web sites today, as well as reading your excellent site to get tips for when we redesign our web site early next year, and I came across this site which seems to suck quite badly.

The home page isn’t the worst I’ve seen, but click on the news, profile, history and products buttons - what genius thought up blue text over a predominantly blue image? Click on the contact button as well - have you ever seen such ridiculous, large, ugly buttons!! There is also a serious lack of useful information and I don’t think it’s been updated in a couple of years.

Wish all our competitors were so lax with their web design!!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: It’s a simple-looking site that’s simply all wrong. My biggest web design complaint is the lack of contrast and we’ve got plenty of that mistake. Didn’t anyone at the company look at the site and wonder why they couldn’t read the navigational buttons? Maybe the English are some super race who aren’t bothered by silly concepts like “contrast” and “readability.” Why did they use graphic buttons for navigation? Why is the TITLE tag — one of the most important tools used by search engines to index this site — called “home?”

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Submitter’s comments: Awful Flash navigation that just wastes space and is not intuitive. The “main menu” at the top doesn’t work until you click on it. Subpages only show sub-page navigation unless you figure out that you can change it to the main menu by clicking the main menu link at the top, to get back to the sub-navigation you have to click the button that says “MAIN “, that’s intuitive.

You can get a snow report by clicking the star next to where it says “Main Menu” (that’s Mystery Meat Navigation). They have also named the site map “Explore.” Wouldn’t have ever figured out what that was because I never would have clicked it on my own.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The word “Awful” in “Awful Flash navigation” is an unnecessary modifier. There is no such thing as good Flash navigation because:

1. Some businesses won’t let employees install plugins
2. Many users of the Firefox browser use an add-in called “Flashblock” which, surprise!, blocks Flash.
3. Sometimes Flash fouls up.

Flash is OK, as an accent just don’t make it your navigation.

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Submitter’s comments: Not great design, but the truly sucky part is in their EULA, which I would violate if I told you about it. Instead, I’ll send you to Archive.Org where you can see it for yourself. It’s the 7th paragraph.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: God, my readers are so very clever. I wouldn’t want to send you to their site because of some user agreement you wouldn’t know you were violating.

Because of the way the EULA is phrased, I’m going to assume their home page informs you of this EULA and makes you click to agree before you can enter in the same way you have to verify you’re old enough to enter a pron site — not that I’ve ever visited any <grin>.

Really bad EULA at Archive.org

Submitter’s comments: Vincent, have I got a Daily Sucker for you! I just found a web site whose background reminds me of Frankie Ford’s web site, which was a Daily Sucker from sometime in the fall of 2006 — remember that one? Well, just one look at the city of Nanty Glo, PA’s web site will make it feel like deja vu as far as backgrounds go, and that’s just the beginning of this site’s suckiness.

The menu at the left works just fine in Internet Explorer, but it’s a real pain to use in Firefox. Not to mention, the popup menus are just plain ugly, period. Also, most of the other pages on the site open in popup windows, and none of them that I looked at have any link back to the home page or anywhere else on the site.

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