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The "A Cave Can be a Black Hole of Death for More Than One Reason Award for Creepy Navigation"

The National Showcaves Centre for Wales (they fixed it, but the link take you to a video of how it was when it won)

Watch the left-hand column closely as the page loads. Look! Some graphical navigation icons! No, wait, they've slipped off to the left! Nothing but a black space there now. How do I get them back?

Ah, wait, there's a message at the top flashing up very slowly. "Use the stalactites, immediately above, to navigate this site." Aha. I run my cursor over the stalactites. A link to "essential information" slides out beneath. I move the cursor down to click on the newly-revealed link - but it slides away before I get to it.

My original comments: Wow! Another incredible version of "Mystery Meat Navigation." The sound of dripping water used on the site is enough to get me to confess to about anything.

Reader comments: OMG, that's terrible. Deserves to be buried at the bottom of a deep cave (luckily for them, they happen to have one handy).

Here's a clue for designers - if you have to include instructions on how to navigate your site, you've not designed it properly. The bizarre thing is that they've produced some perfectly acceptable side menu graphics (not sure whether they really mean to have "meat [sic] the Dinosaurs" though) and hid them behind this rubbish MMN setup.

Oh, and if you haven't figured it out, you have to point your cursor at the stalactite, let the slidy out thingie tell you what it means, them click on the stalactite. I know those sliding graphics look like a menu, but they aren't.

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There's an accessibility issue here. The Principality of Wales has two official languages, English and Welsh, and they have equal status. A substantial number of Welsh people speak English only as a second language.

On this site, all of the text is in English. But much of the text (not, however, the navigation) can be read out to you if you place your mouse pointer over the appropriate flag. I suppose that's meant to be a compromise, but it does mean that hearing-impaired Welsh speakers — or Welsh speakers without sound cards, or Welsh speakers who worry about their bandwidth — are out of luck here. Not that the sound files are very reliable, at least not on my DSL connection.

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Ahh so many bad web sites successfully hiding so much good content. When will people learn that the web site is just the mechanism and NOT the attraction? Have some fun by all means but please, please let me find what I am looking for.

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