In the name of fuck website designers, WTF is wrong with you?

The BBQ Pit
121

I’ve tried that. It often doesn’t work.

Keep in mind, my client is almost always a boss or coworker. I have had a couple of exceptions, but usually for me it’s something in-house. I did a web site for the City of Corvallis, Oregon, specifically a web site that talked about Endangered Species Act enforcement, but in that case I took an existing web site and fixed a bunch of technical problems. That’s the only one off the top of my head that involved a web site owned by someone other than my employer.

The worst situation was when I was working as a SharePoint administrator (that was one of many hats I wore, it was a small organization). I was asked to take their old SharePoint server, migrate it to a new version, and then overhaul the look of everything. My “client” was my boss (the CIO) in that situation. He insisted on using this skin that was a mixture of a jet black background and a red leather-looking skin in places. Text was red and yellow. It looked freaking hideous. And to make matters worse, it was a skin for the previous version of SharePoint, so I had to shoehorn it in to make it work on our new site. So it was glitchy to boot. It was hard to look at, but he thought it was the most gorgeous thing ever.

Months later, after a number of shenanigans I won’t go into, my boss was gone. So I took the liberty of removing that skin so it wouldn’t look like a Hot Topic advertisement. I tried for something really clean and sensible, with a white background, some simple light green accents in places, and black text. I must have received dozens of thank you emails from people immediately after. Keep in mind that this SharePoint site was the internal web site for everyone at that organization, it was something that everyone interacted with all day every day. Some people had trouble even freaking reading it before.

It’s possible that the web site you are griping about was put together by someone who warned the company that customers are going to be griping about it, but they didn’t care because it didn’t fit their “vision” or whatever. :tired_face:

122

I am not by any means a web developer, but I’m usually the one given the job of putting something up on the university web content management system.

If the people I do this for had a vision, even a bad one, then I’d have something to work with. I could always blame the rigidity of the CM that it doesn’t have black backgrounds and red leather text.

My problem is that the “clients” have no vision, and no ideas. They know they want something, but they’re not sure what. I don’t know enough about design to be too helpful.

When people ask me to “make them a website,” I tell them to send me some content they want put up, the format doesn’t matter, and some pictures to go with it, and I’ll arrange it nicely. Usually I don’t hear back.

When I make websites where it is my job to come up with the content, I always try and think about what information the people using the website will want, and make that the easiest to find. That’s why my websites always look like a list of topics, but (I hope) the list at least provides the information people came to find.

123

…the TLDR version, courtesy of the Oatmeal.

For every successful “we showed them how it was what their potential customers wanted, and would bring in more business”, you also get as many “FINE! I’ll give you a design that POPS!”

124

The fully mature version of this ends up with you implementing what you, in the best possible faith, believe meets their inchoate and inexpressable desires. And then being told “No, that’s not really it.”

I call this “not that rock, bring me another” incremental development

125

That is painfully familiar. Especially the, “It’s great, but…” That always goes badly.

126

…gosh yes. :frowning:

For a real life version of this playing out: watch this video from the people at the Futr.

Background: the design team were tasked with redesigning their own website from scratch, and they filmed the whole process from start-to-not-quite-the-end. The trailer for the series is here:

If you watch the first video I posted you will see what happens when the CEO of the company saw what the team had been working on and outright rejected the design. The video ends there: but what happens next is that they went back and completely redid the website to match what the CEO asked for and they ended up with what, IMHO, was a complete and utter mess. The design that they presented in the video ticked all the boxes. The design they eventually went for was a horrible, confusing mess that missed all the major points from the original spec.

(NB: If you visit the Futr website now it has been redesigned again: what is online now is much closer to the original design that was rejected by the CEO than what they initially built. )

I wrote this critique at the time.

Sometimes what the client needs and what the client demands are two very different things. In some cases (like the one outlined by digs) you can bring the client back-on-track. But to a degree in order to do that you have to be in the position to walk away from the client in order to make your point. If you can’t do that (as in, you’ve already spent the deposit and you need the the final payment so you can pay rent next month) then its just a matter of doing what needs to be done.

127

That was the experience of a friend of mine, whose family owns and operates a local Chinese restaurant. Prior to the pandemic, they were on Facebook only (my friend’s idea, as his parents aren’t very good with social media). I asked Buddy why the restaurant had no web page, and he said, “We haven’t needed one so far.” I’m not surprised, as the food is fantastic.

Then the pandemic hit, and restaurants had to close. For indoor dining, at least; pick-up and delivery were still permitted. And Buddy’s restaurant’s Facebook page was little help. Oh, it had plenty of photos of dishes, and “Love your food” comments, but it listed neither prices, nor all dishes. Photos of dishes are no good for pick-up or delivery when you don’t know what they are or what they cost.

Buddy knew that the restaurant could be in trouble, so he realized that the restaurant needed a web page stating vital info, and so he set one up. To his credit, he used a simple page builder, such as is offered through hosting sites like GoDaddy, and though he’s no designer, he built what I’d call a very effective site for the restaurant.

The home page has “Welcome to Jade Garden” (fictional name, but let it work for now) at the top, so there is no mistaking what site you’ve landed on. Below that, is a photo of the restaurant taken from the parking lot, with the sign saying “Jade Garden,” so you can recognize it when you arrive if you’ve placed a pick-up order. Below that, is “Open for pick-up and delivery, Noon - 9:00 PM.” And below that, the address, phone number, delivery charge, and a screenshot of a Google map, showing the restaurant’s location.

The only link on the page is “View Menu,” which, if you click it, leads to another page with “Welcome to Jade Garden” at the top, and every menu item, with prices before tax. At the bottom is the phone number, delivery charge, and hours again.

Overall, it is very simple, and lacks a lot of “Pop!” and “Edginess!” but it proved very effective. The restaurant survived through the pandemic, and does to this day, but it did so much more better when it had a proper webpage than it did when it only had a Facebook page. Even if that webpage was designed and built by Buddy, who had absolutely no design experience. Maybe that was a good thing, as he made it so simple that everybody could navigate it easily and get the information they need.

128

That’s not how it works. The value of professional work in a situation like this, where the law does not require a licensed professional, is the time I save by not having to do it myself. I could (and actually just did) the job in under 30 minutes, and almost all of that was searching StackExchange and W3schools like the amateur I am. I must assume a professional could do it significantly faster.

I get paid an hourly rate too, with benefits, and it’s not anywhere near $200/hr. However,

This is understandable and I did say <$100 was a reasonable price for the webpage we wanted. I’ll backtrack to “<=$100”. The website developers pitching $1,000/mo to design and host our website were still wasting everyone’s time, and the result was that our boss used one of those web design templates pitted in this thread, with the contact number at the bottom of the page under “Contact Us”.

~Max

129

Well, some of them did, anyway. The ones that didn’t were among the many businesses that failed during the pandemic. Folks often forget that “survival of the fittest” works by those who aren’t fit enough, not surviving.

Sounds like he started by knowing what he actually needed, and then did what he had to to get what he needed, and didn’t waste any time on what he didn’t need. If only everyone working on any sort of project worked that way.

130

XKCD has a Venn diagram about that, academia rather than restaurants but I think it’s universal.

131

That’s a pretty good reference to be made twice in the same thread. :slight_smile:

(It’s post 27-ish, hard to tell in Discourse.)

132

I absolutely totally 100% approve of this rant. As a former web designer, I cannot imagine what they think websites are even for.

133

I often want to know how to find out more/contact a local farm, csa, or farmstand. This level of business is the one I find most lacking in common sense. Pictures of sunlit fields, sheep, or people holding up tomatoes, but nothing – NOTHING ANYWHERE – on where they actually are, a phone, an email. At best, on the contact page you get one of those boxes to fill in with your message and a send button. And they almost always have a facebook page with exactly the same stuff on it, no location, or “in lovely Springfield”. Really chaps me.

134

[doublechecks web page made years ago by a friend]

[approximate location and where to buy in the top text paragraph on home page

links to contact page and market page and availability at both top and side

market page tells you exact location and time of market

contact page gives name, phone number, mailing/physical address of farm, and email, as an image]

135

If only your friend made all the web pages.

136

Dang it. Too lazy to look.

To show off their awesome designers skillz, of course.

137

Even worse is emergency services. When they want to get info out in a hurry many only use FB or Twitter; it would be fairly easy to do a one-time setup so that that info goes to FB, Twitter, & a scrolling feed on the department’s / town’s website with the appropriate person keying it in only once. Putting out emergency information (“There’s a haz-mat fire at ___; anyone in the area stay inside & keep your windows closed”) to only certain people willing to use a third-party app is unconscionable.

Don’t forget Palau; it’s not even a state; it’s a US protectorate about the size of my small community. Why the eff does it show up first if you want to enter Pennsylvania???

Brings a whole new meaning

::flees::

138

It’s not a state because it’s a sovereign nation. It is in “free association” with the United States, in that the US provides defense and other kinds of aid, but the US doesn’t govern it. It signed its constitution in 1979 and was established as a republic in 1981. The US did govern the area since capturing it from Japan in WWII, before it established independence.

It does have a pretty small population, a bit over 18,000 people. It’s a chain of almost 350 small islands, most of which aren’t habitable. Palau isn’t the smallest country by population though, it’s the 4th smallest after Tuvalu, Nauru, and Vatican City. (Vatican City has a population of 800!)

139
140

My pet peeve with news articles and technology articles is this: Put the date at the beginning of the article.

It makes all the difference if the tragedy happened yesterday or if it happened in 2007.

Likewise, the neat article on some obscure part of Windows having security issues while interacting with a particular brand of NAS becomes less relevant if someone actually includes “July, 2003” in the headline. It makes it easier to sift through the dross.