[thelist] site check: brownecenter.com

[Wade Armstrong]

on 9/10/02 9:19 AM, Rob Sylvan at rsylvan at cdtmicrographics.com wrote:
> I've been volunteering my time for a number of years to do the maintenance
> on a website for a great organization.
>
> Well, it just went live. I can't believe what they did.
>
> Since they would still like for me to do the maintenance for the site, and
> they are all very dear people, I'd like to prepare an assessment of sorts of
> what I see wrong with this new design.
> The site is brownecenter.com

Maintenance will be a disaster on this one. Open in Fireworks, make text
changes, slice, export, upload - too many steps, especially in the slicing
which you'll have to do each time.

It's bizarre that they would've chosen to make this layout graphics-only.
There's absolutely nothing I see that can't easily be accomplished with
HTML. But, instead of taking the easy and correct solution of turning this
layout into simple HTML tables, they used all graphics, which means:
- Low search engine rankings, since none of the words on the page are
visible to search engines (and the titles don't help with that)
- Site can't be viewed by people using assistive technologies, such as
screen readers, which means that visually-impaired users are locked out
- Some links can't be tabbed between, locking out people who prefer keyboard
navigation or who are unable to use a mouse.
- Site may not be available at all in alternative browsers, such as those on
some PDAs and cell phones (not vital now, but will be within a few years,
possibly before the next redesign)

Additionally, I find that some of the text (for instance, on "The Clients")
is poorly anti-aliased and harder to read than standard browser text.

Wade