The Daily Sucker

Daily Sucker for Friday, January 30, 2009

January 30th, 2009 3:03 am by Vincent Flanders

Submitter’s comments: I find it hard to believe that someone at some point in time found this “cool” and paid for it. It’s an Austrian university’s website.

The above is the link to the English version. The German version opens a pop-up onload as an extra. So all non-German-reading visitors are really missing out! :P

The “C” metaphor of the navigation scheme is obviously derived from the logo. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should! It’s wrong to put the logo on the bottom right, especially
when there’s so much empty space on the top left of the page!

The navigation is a set of image maps, and the whole thing is in layout tables.

I also dislike that on the home page it doesn’t highlight individual links on hover, making the blocks of links look like one huge link and that the subpages are made with frames.

If you reload the page with JavaScript disabled it will show the links for Masters and Bachelors degrees. As far as I can see, you can actually reach all content without JS and images enabled, but the metaphor really loses whatever impact it might have had.

As for your pet peeve, yup, we seem to have contrast issues too.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This is the most bizarre navigation that I’ve seen in a long time. When you go to the German version of the site, no white menu text shows up. This is very bizarre.

I’ve never seen the main logo placed in this position before. On subpages, the logo is at the bottom of the page. Huh?

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