[thelist] site check: brownecenter.com

[Michael Kimsal]

On Tue, 2002-09-10 at 12:19, Rob Sylvan wrote:
>
> 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.
> Where I need help is providing the rationale for why things are bad. As an
> example I'll tell you that *all* of the text on the site is done as graphics
> (yes, all of it). I know this is bad because people can't resize it, you
> can't copy and paste it, it will be a real pain to update, etc. But what I'd
> like to give them is a real industry rationale for why this is bad, not just
> my opinion so that maybe they can make some good decisions about fixing the
> worst offenders. I also have no idea how it displays on Macs or *nix boxes.
> Any opinions/suggestions and thoughts are greatly appreciated.
> The site is brownecenter.com
>

Someone else pointed out most of the flaws with this approach, but
something else which is annoying from a usability standpoint is
non-underlined links.  We've been guilty of this in some
sites- not saying we're perfect.  But man oh man - I don't know
what to click and what not to there.  What's worse, at least
one 'link' was specifically done as a graphic with underlined text -
so they MUST know that 'underlining' indicates 'clickable', yet
hardly anything else is (or nothing else that I can see).

It's OK on Mozilla under Linux, but that dropdown things that happen
when you rollover the things at the bottom flicker when you're moving
between them, presumably because you're moving over 'empty space'
at that moment.

You like them so do what you'd like, but if I had a builder
build me a bad house that was essentially unmaintainable
(and also precluded certainly friends and family visiting
me because of architectural decisions) I wouldn't
expect a separate maintenance company to actually do everything
that I asked them to - at least not without a lot money
having to be spent.

HTH