[thelist] This site will make yo u cry (to the tune of £1 ,000,000)

Simon Willison simon at incutio.com
Wed Jul 10 19:11:00 CDT 2002


At 18:59 10/07/2002 -0500, Ben Henick wrote:
>On Thu, 11 Jul 2002, Shashank Tripathi wrote:
>
> > Just a thought. My point is: indifference to that ludicrous website is
> > perhaps the best punishment they deserve. Ignore it instead of blogging
> > it all over.
>
>Except for one thing...
>
>Accountability.  If I was a British ratepayer, I'd be rightfully livid to
>know that the money I spend is going into tripe like that.
>
>Then there is the matter of Government involvement.
>
>And so on, and so on.

Then there's the fact that if we DON'T make a fuss about sites like this
people may never even realise there's something wrong with them. This kind
of thing sets the internet and the web design industry back years - we
can't just let it go by saying "we'll just be giving it free publicity", or
the people involved (and budding developers who see their abomination as
"the cutting edge of the web") will keep doing it, wasting millions more
and further increasing the divide between high profile sites and good
design practise, standards and accessibility. Do you remember the press
Boo.com got when it was realised that their hugely expensive e-commerce
site was a usability nightmare? It benefited the whole e-commerce industry
as other e-tailers realised that shoddy accessibility was fundamentally bad
for business. Give them press, give them hell and help teach the rest of
the industry a valuable lesson - sites like that should go the way of the
dinosaurs. Stay silent and no one will learn a thing.

I'm off to bed. Really this time. I need to cut down on the caffeine ;)

Simon




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