MillsMash

From time to time I use web sites which frustrate and anger me. I’m left wondering why they are hard to use, why so little thought has been put in and why some obvious opportunities have been missed. But what really really makes my blood boil is when I see a site that has been badly developed, especially when a developer has taken a reasonable, sometimes simple concept and made a complete mess of it.

Today I have, amongst other things, been looking over a clients site, Sorouh. The website is far from the worst i’ve seen in this region, in fact it looks positively up-to-date compared to some i have seen. The design is simple with a good amount of information and even has a site map for SEO purposes but then i started to notice strange things. The site map link was not being recognized as a link, on hovering over the “Developments” menu the link shown was different from the page you landed on. Then i looked at the source code and i nearly cried.

The developments home page is nearly 800Kb in size, the homepage html alone is over 1700 lines and 155kb in size and the javascript is 700 lines long and 214kb in size! All the page displays is a bit of flash, a few images and some 400 words! Who ever developed the site seems to have included every Ajax / Javascript library. The have surrounded simple links with entire html tables which then have onClick events on them which over-rides the link its surrounding. Every menu link is re-written in javascript and the links that appear in the html are different to the ones that appear in the javascript.

I fail to understand how someone can code such a simple site so badly. Time is not even an excuse as they have way over complicated it and at least doubled if not trippled the amount of work they needed to do. Programming should be simple, elegant and serve a purpose, not a complete waste of time and space! What makes this worse is it’s so un-necessary, adversely affects SEO and impacts the time taken to display the page and thus the user experience.

As i mentioned in my last post I have recently taken a position with The Brand Union in the Middle East. Having only ever worked for IT / Online marketing companies branding is not something that I have given much consideration for. I’ve always realised it’s importance but just left it up to someone else. Obviously now that i work for a branding agency my views and insights have substantially changed and so inline with that some of my posts going forward will feature an element of branding and this is going to be the first.

Mozilla have just released new functionality for their Firefox internet browser which allows users to easily and quickly download a new look for their browser. This feature provides consumers with a great new way to personalize their browser around a brand. This could be utilised as an excellent feature for brands like the Premiership or the GAA where there is a big fan base. In fact, on of the persona’s already made available, one is for the Champions League football tournament.

To use the persona you need to download a new plugin for Firefox which places a fox logo in the bottom left of the browser window. Clicking on this presents you with a wide array of pre-created persona’s for you to select from. Rolling over each persona enables you to preview the persona. What’s also neat is that if you visit a website with persona’s on it, simply hovering over persona on the page will preview the persona in your browser and simply clicking on the thumbnail will install that persona in an instant.

The personalization of the browser allows for a background picture to be applied to the main bars at the top of the browser as well as the status bar and for a different colour scheme.

Read more here: http://www.getpersonas.com