Design on a Dime

Just nitpicking today, nothing to see here.

I was looking for a friends business website yesterday and was pretty upset to see it was all done in flash, including the navigation (don’t get me started on the annoying background music; what, you don’t want people to use your site at work?). You know the kind of sites I’m talking about, where you cant actually reference a particular page because the URL stays static. The City of Worcester site is a good example, although they use some sort of Java navigation, not flash. The point is, if I wanted to send someone to the City Managers page, i couldn’t do it and still keep the site intact. The site I was looking for yesterday was designed by Worcesters Reaction Advertising, their own site was built the same way; more flash, more sound and no way to reference any particular section of the site. You need to start from the splash page and dig for what your looking for. The only people who do up the web this way are architects and design firms, which has me wondering how it is more buildings don’t just blow over in the wind. Its form with no acknowledgment of function and in the case of web design the single largest scam in the industry.

Well I’m not a designer, just a user, so I guess I’ll have to turn this one over to my buddies at sites that suck for a professional breakdown.

Post by: Brendan | March 3, 2006 | Filed Under The Big Woo, everything else 

Comments

4 Responses to “Design on a Dime”

  1. Eric on March 3rd, 2006 8:31 am

    The city of worcester’s site makes the unfortunate design decision to use frames. Just a bad idea. Flash for Flash’s sake is my BIGGEST pet peeve as a designer. It’s worthless. Thing is, clients LOVE flash. They like moving blinky shit. Design should be seperate from content. Flash robs that shit. Oh well… later they’ll wonder why their site isn’t being crawled by Google. Idiots.

  2. Mike Benedetti on March 3rd, 2006 11:21 am

    I like all the info on the City’s website; thing is, you have to invest some time in finding the secret places where all the info is stashed. The website expands the group of mandarins with access to this info, but the “common man” is still prevented from learning anything about what the city is up to.

    One more rant about this website: a day after the Social Service Siting Report was released last fall, Kevin Ksen and I took the time to make it available on-line. It took a week for the city to post this document on the city’s website, and it was a crappy low-res PDF scan. Somebody could have turned the original Word doc into a PDF and posted it in about 60 seconds, making a higher-quality, smaller file.

    I am going to do some work on a local non-profit’s website. I asked one of the people who built it how certain things were done, and after he explained, he said, “Of course, it doesn’t have to be done that way.” Music to my ears.

  3. paxton on March 3rd, 2006 12:47 pm

    I was blown away by that link you posted on VB yesterday Mike. I had no idea there were documents stored online in raw format by the city.

    Thats what I get by spending my whole day trying to guess the password for the city hall cam so I can aim it wherever I want. I’m missing all the cool shit.

  4. Mike Benedetti on March 3rd, 2006 1:05 pm

    Here is another bit of city website voodoo.

    The latest still from the City Hall Cam is:
    http://66.189.127.64/oneshotimage.jpg

    This was used to make a time-lapse movie of people installing 2,000 crosses on the commons:
    Movie (WMV, 11MB, 4 minutes)



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