The Daily Sucker

Submitter’s comments: Check this one out.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Five succinct words: Check it out on BrowserCam.

STH Conference

Submitter’s comments: Irony of ironies: A disabilities web site that is spectacularly ill-suited for people with vision problems like color blindness. (Warning: If you are not blind now, you will be after viewing the site. Wear welding goggles.)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, actually, it isn’t “spectacularly ill-suited for people with vision problems like color blindness,” it’s just butt-ugly. I ran the home page against Visicheck’s color blindness simulator for both deuteronope and protanope color blindness and then checked the results against AccessColor for contrast issues and discovered:

4.68% failure for both color difference and color brightness for deuteronopic color blindness

3.28% failure for both color difference and color brightness for protanopic color blindness

0.00% for the regular web site.

On the other hand either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 6.56% of the total the text for the regular site. The deuteronope version’s failure rate was 3.51% and the protanope version was 0.47%.

The text is also tiny, but you can resize it by typing CTRL+ but the colors are soooo horrid.

DRM Guide to Disability Resources on the Internet

Deuteronope screenshot

Protanope screenshot

Submitter’s comments: The city of Clarksville has redone their website. It is disorganized and confusing. Have a look and see for yourself. Maybe you can use it as a bad example.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Well, I jumped from the city’s page to the police department’s page because you usually can’t go wrong with police sites. The fugly splash page weighs in at 1.47 megabytes. OK. What’s causing this page to bloat like a puffer fish? It’s those poisonous images on the left and right. One is 523,675 bytes and the other is 741,098 bytes. Just to show you what a nice guy I am, reduced the size of the images to fit in your HEIGHT=”413″ image attribute. Here is image #1 (25Kb) and here’s image #2 (48Kb) — and I didn’t really try to optimize them. Feel free to use them and cut out 1,189,578 bytes of fat from your web page.

The copyright page says “2006,” but it’s more like 1996. On the other hand, the unnecessary splash page looks better than the real home page with its centered gold and silver text. Is it possible to have a bigger logo? Yes, but I don’t want to see it.

Clarksville Police Department

Submitter’s comments: Here is a site for you.  I can’t figure out what is the purpose of the site.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: I can’t figure it out either. I’m guessing that it’s an art site, which means it shouldn’t qualify as a Daily Sucker, but it’s so egregiously horrible I have to use it.

It’s made with Flash, of course, and it’s called “The Oculus.” The first five times I went there, I couldn’t get past the first screen. Then I clicked “something” and the ball opened up. It seems that what opens up varies. When the squares are big, I never was able to go further. One time, it just seemed to go on its own and I ended up at Miss Vix’s Tattoo Parlor.

This isn’t art. It’s the web equivalent of what happens to the Mike Douglas character in Mr. Mike on Halloween. (MAY BE NSFW. Turn speakers down. You’ve been warned.)

The Oculus

Submitter’s comments: Here is a website that was brought to my attention through a co-worker. The first words out of my mouth were “They really need to avoid working on their website after engaging in a round of ‘product quality testing.’”

Then as we clicked on the various links, I couldn’t help but recall your hilarious YouTube video review of Marijuana.org.

So I submit to you, under the category ‘coding under the influence,’ the website for the Aviator Brewing Company.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: The different colored, centered text reminds me of the old Marijuana.org site, which is no longer operational. I think they’re trying for the “drinking buddy” informal writing style like you see on the Brewing page and the other pages. Unfortunately, it doesn’t come off as clever but it reminds me of Dean Wormer’s comment in the movie classic Animal House: “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

Aviator Brewing

Submitter’s comments: This is a disaster cleanup company (top listing under “disaster cleanup companies” at Google) that is surely in need of its own services.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Hmm. A top ranking at Google is nothing to sneeze at. On the other hand, the site is just begging for a redesign. We have a lack of contrast on the menu buttons at the top of the page and the in the sub-menus the “&” is run together — “Fire&Smoke Restoration” — with the text. The Flash is annoying, but inconsequential since there are no links. There are contrast issues with the black text on the the dark silver background on the left menu and the page scrolls horizontally.

This site reminds me of my favorite cleanup company’s web site, and a past Daily Sucker, Scene-Clean. Makes today’s Daily Sucker look like CSS Zen Garden, doesn’t it?

The home page has an interesting problem. Search engines look at the HTML code in sequence and place a higher priority on material near the top. When you linearize the home page, the first couple of screens are not what you’d expect. Poor layout.

Disaster Cleanup

Submitter’s comments: Vincent: I thought you’d love this one — the home page is one single image with no real text and an image map for navigation.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Looks like somebody had a brochure lying around. C’mon. This is soooo 1997. On the other hand, it’s PageRank is 2, with is double what Heritage Development achieved with their much fancier site. They use image maps throughout the site. Surprisingly, the code-to text ratio on this site is 10.02%.

Holthaus Signs