Dear web design customers, I hate you all. (LONG)

[Ironclad Alibi]

Slowest Email Ever
SC: "When they click on the mail button on our website it needs to send it to our street address because we don't like using email."

Really? Is is... is this actually a thing? A common misconception of how 'teh interwebz' works? Should I be worried...?

Sending email to a street address is a reality.

[PixelJockey]

(I'm talking to you, AJ, you clueless, ethically stunted little fuck.)

I call mine Howie...

[Cazzi]

Nah..more like this.

I think my brain does that every day I read the SC stories!
And its taking me a long time to get through them all!

[Chrismor]

Oh my...

As the person who is head of web design and advertising for the company I work for I am lucky that I only have to answer to one person. You, however have my sympathy.

On a side note, I regularly have 4 "red" colours on my palette, 2 of which go to the same publisher, on the same printer, but their logo design is slightly different (both logos are for red top newspapers, but both reds are different for some strange reason.)

[lwb]

And those are called "QR Codes". They can embed URLs into them, and smartphones can read them and launch the browser pointing at the URL. Hell, I've seen a blog which was nothing but QR codes, where the posts were typed up and encoded as the QR code. You then had to use a decoder to read the text.

So, the tech exists. It's just not catching on very well as yet.

It may start to catch on more now. Check out Microsoft Tag. They are much more user friendly than standard QR codes (at least to make from what I've found) and they come in COLOR!

[protege]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned the "thumbnail" idiots yet. These fools will have photo galleries on their pages. Nothing really wrong with that. But, unlike those of us who will edit our photos to low-res GIFs, and use *that* as the thumbnail...they'll simply edit the photo size settings...but link to to the same photo. Then they can't understand why the page takes so long to load, and why people (myself included) won't wait for it.

Even worse, are the idiots who...instead of declaring a plain background, will make a 1x1 image, and then "tile" that crap

[elsporko]

I think the worse people that design websites are the ones who throw so much flash on there that it takes the site five minutes to load. I'm just looking for some info, I don't want to watch a movie before going to the site or be bombarded by little moving images and noises. Just let me get what I want to know and leave.

Musician's sites are extremely bad for this. They'll have less content then wikipedia and ten times as much useless garbage.

[PepperElf]

Bend Space to My Will!

oh god... in my web design class that was one of the first things the teacher said NOT to do. Ever.

the more you restrict - or try to restrict - your customer's options for viewing a web page, the less they'll want to use your site.


i mean hell the first thing i do when i dislike small font on a site is increase the font size.



now for the barcodes in the newspaper... that's REALLY popular in Japan. most cells are designed to translate the square codes into text or URLs.

[Andara Bledin]

now for the barcodes in the newspaper... that's REALLY popular in Japan. most cells are designed to translate the square codes into text or URLs.

Those are the afore-mentioned QR codes.

The only place I've ever seen them or seen them mentioned in the US (other than threads like this one) is a T-shirt that Think Geek was giving away for a while.

^-.-^

[Chrismor]

Those are the afore-mentioned QR codes.

The only place I've ever seen them or seen them mentioned in the US (other than threads like this one) is a T-shirt that Think Geek was giving away for a while.

^-.-^

Ah, Think Geek. It seems fitting that they would sell a shirt like that. 3of my favourite shirts are Think Geek, too. I am the proud owner of the "Theres no place like 127.0.0.1", "It must be user error" and "No, I will not fix your computer" shirts.

C.

[Andara Bledin]

I've been meaning to pick up the "no place like 127.0.0.1" shirt, myself.

The QR code on their shirt said "This is not the free t-shirt you are looking for. You can go about your business. Oh, and buy cool stuff at thinkgeek.com. *waves hand*"

^-.-^

[RecoveringKinkoid]

Okay. I just read the Joel Stein article in the back of Time. Stein is freaking hilarious. He mentioned that a sixteen year old was paid twenty-eight bucks to design www.heidi-pratt.com. I went over there to see

1. If this sixteen year old entrepreneur, who evidently has started a graphic design company, knew what he was doing. In all honesty, props to him for at least taking the plunge. I have learned that skill and talent is grossly overrated in this field.

2. What twenty eight bucks will get you.

Now, someone thought this site was just fine and dandy. At first glance, it's pretty. Very pink. However, the design on the splash page is all over the road ike a drunk driver. Sloppy. And evidently, this kid has not figured out (as many have not) that if you can't read the text, there's no reason to put it on there. And you can't read the text. It's pink on pink and tiny.

No back or home button. Half the links go nowhere. And the main body of the page is a bunch of shit around the border of an essentially blank page.

I have no doubt that someone thought this site was top notch. And that is the thing. Clients are perfectly content to hand the neighbor's kid a twenty and assume that whatever he turns out is professional level.

What the hell, really. It's worth about twenty eight bucks. Fair enough. Does the kid's skill level increase with the amount of money he's paid? Who knows. But I guess the client here got what they were paying for.

BUSINESSES do this. Really, this is their corporate identity we are talking about, and they do not know the difference between a quality, professionally made page and dogshit. And worse, they don't even care.

You wanna know what I have stooped to in order to get a design approved by a higher up?

Throw some cats on there. Seriously. If I knew I had to leave a place in the design for, say, three photos, I'd get a couple stock pics of cats and use them for placeholders. The client liked cats. He'd see the design...but really all he'd see were the CATS, get a warm, fuzzy feeling, and approve the design. I could have stuck a cat face on a turd and gotten the turd approved.

And just to cover my ass, I'd make some designs that were obviously what he did NOT want...just to give him something to say "no" to. People like to rule out stuff. Throw him something to actively dislike, and you got all your bases covered.

This backfired on me a couple times when the client approved the "rejection decoy" instead of the real design. But it usually did work.

[mikoyan29]

My eyes!!!! Ack....

[mattm04]

My companies new website is bad IMHO. First, their is no link to the home page. Only "home sections" for things like customer service, about, etc. Along the top and bottom of the page home page are multiple links (at lest 2) for things like employment, store locations, etc. A news ticker/crawler that does not go to a news page, but individual pages. If you want to see a different link, wait watch and be ready to click. Along the top are drop-down menus ot Online Shopping, savings, etc. They are static lengths with space for say 5 links, but if there is only 2 links it show a big empty blob for the rest if more than 5 it just spills the white text onto the white background of the page.

[BeeMused]

My companies new website is bad IMHO. First, their is no link to the home page. Only "home sections" for things like customer service, about, etc. Along the top and bottom of the page home page are multiple links (at lest 2) for things like employment, store locations, etc. A news ticker/crawler that does not go to a news page, but individual pages. If you want to see a different link, wait watch and be ready to click. Along the top are drop-down menus ot Online Shopping, savings, etc. They are static lengths with space for say 5 links, but if there is only 2 links it show a big empty blob for the rest if more than 5 it just spills the white text onto the white background of the page.

*shudder* Looks like a candidate for this site: http://webpagesthatsuck.com/