PARTNERS + simons

Submitter’s comments: Static image so important, they had to hide the navigation. Never had to ‘drag’ a hidden nav-bar open before.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What’s worse is that the hidden navigation doesn’t always show up. It didn’t show up on my IE 7, but it did on IE8. Here are some BrowserCam screen shots that show the hidden navigation doesn’t always show up.

PARTNERS + simons

Danneman Signs

Submitter’s comments: Yikes!

Vincent Flanders’ comments: What drives me stark raving crazy is the fact that I can’t read some of the text. Why? Because there’s not enough contrast.

Does anyone with two working eyes ever look at their pages and notice that the text is impossible/hard to read?

Danneman Signs

Article: “10 signs you don’t understand web analytics” – http://bit.ly/7OXVUm

DPGraph

Submitter’s comments: I was searching the web for some assembly language information and I “crossed eyes” with this site. Since then I cannot type properly, I’ve grown a third ear and my retina is starting to decay <grin>.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Ironically, the site has found a good use for animated images — to show off their 3D graphing software. Unfortunately, they couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to use an animated GIF background. This takes the site from being sloppy to Over the Top.

All they have to do to improve the site and raise it to the level of mediocre is just remove the animated background. I just changed one HTML statement and made the site infinitely better. (In case they remove the background image, here’s a screen shot of the original page.)

DPGraph

Stingrays Studios

Submitter’s comments: Check out this bad boy. It’s the BEST auto art web site in the WORLD, and I can’t for the life of me understand what they do.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Yeah, it also took me a while to figure out what they do. I think they make custom cars, but I might be wrong and that should be a warning sign (see #2 below). The site commits over half of the Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015:

1. Believing people care about you and your web site.
2. A man from Mars can’t figure out what your web site is about in less than four seconds.
4. Using design elements that get in the way of your visitors.
6. Have you ever seen another web site? Really? Doesn’t look like it.
7. Navigational failure.
10. Forgetting the purpose of text.
11. Too much material on one page.
14. Misunderstanding the use of graphics

Oh, and the home page is 13.82Mb.

Stingrays Studios

Official Electric Church

Submitter’s comments: There’s something bizarre about not being able to read what’s on a church web site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I agree. You’d think it would be more important to be able to read what’s on a church site than on a commercial site. If the Bible were written like religious-oriented web sites are designed, Christianity would only exist as a small Jewish cult.

Ironically, this site looks like a church site, but it’s a site for a band. Yes, I know music sites are exempt because they’re not real businesses and nobody cares about them but their fans, but the site is more useful than most sites, except for the lack of contrast.

I ran the home page through AccessColor and they said:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 0% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 87.9% of the total the text.

   A Warning message is displayed next to the HTML source line.

Text on background with images is for 7.39% of the total text.

What’s important to note is that the text on background with images is actually the menu and you can’t read the menu. Didn’t anybody to see if you could read the text on the menu? The text is also too light, but it isn’t as bad as other sites like Xerox and Techsoup.org.

Official Electric Church

The 5 Doves

Submitter’s comments: Maybe there is a secret network of these sites that feed off each other’s design efforts.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Oh, god. That’s just what I don’t need — a conspiracy theory about Over-the-top Web Sites <grin>. On the other hand, it would explain so much.

I’ve seen sites where they use different colors on lines of text; I’ve seen sites where they use different colors on each word; however, I don’t remember too many sites where there’s a different color for each letter of text.

The web site’s name, “The 5 Doves,” initially led me to believe I was going to see a 50’s cover band or a Christian music group. I got the Christian part right. That’s all that’s right with this site.

The 5 Doves

There’s Kenneth Biros and there’s Kenneth Biros.

Website Owner’s Manual — 2 free PDF chapters from the book – http://bit.ly/6EVKqK and http://bit.ly/8Mftfl