BS: Badly Designed Websites

Subject: BS: BADLY DESIGNED WEBSITES
From: The Sandman
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 12:30 PM

I have been looking at websites recently, and noticed how much they can vary in standard of design, concertina net seems quite well designed whereas, www,session .org, must be the most poorly designed discussion forum /website, I have come across.
For example on www.session .org discussions cannot be brought back to the front, there is also no facility to edit posts., and yet the boards owner claims to be website designer, some advertisement.
concertina net in contrast has all these facilities, plus an excellent tune a tron converter

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: olddude
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 12:51 PM

A person can be a very very strong technical geek, however can make a very poor looking website. There really are two types of sites. The ones I do are highly technical, used in house only for corporations. High database use and specific functionality like keeping track of product defects on the production line etc. Then their are websites for the outside world. The outside world websites need a graphic artist. Most technical people are very good with the code but not so good at the pretty. An outside world website to be professional needs someone highly skilled in graphics art. Those people are very good at pretty. Usually not really good at the guts of the sites but that is why they have geeks who are.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Will Fly
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 12:57 PM

TheSession.org is a quirky little website - not the best, perhaps - but a huge resource for tunes. I can put up with the interface for the sake of the contents!

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: open mike
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 01:39 PM

left brain - right brain

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 02:23 PM

Norris, ? I was praising concertina net,I was criticising the sessions design, in relation to the discussion forum, so what you are trying to say is irrelevant,
I happen to be suspeneded from the session until sep 14 ,not banned, I was suspended for saying Llig Leahcim was talking balls.
Llig is suspended until sep 16,
yes, I am banned from concertina net, but I can view the site objectively, and see what is good about it, it is a well designed site
my photograph on my website is quite recent and does look like me.
of course Norris? you would know better than me how i am looking, having seen me more recently.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 06:02 PM

Many years ago, an Aussie organization ran a 'design competition' for websites. One of the 'favored to win' entries was by a teenager, who used the design SW from his parents design company to produce a very pretty graphic site that was almost unload-able on my dialup.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: ragdall
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 06:08 PM

I like to keep a website as simple as possible. Few frills, fast loading, easy to navigate. Many sites are "designed" using preset templates and can be a headache to edit or update.

rags

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 06:52 PM

www.thesession.org loads fast thanks to having almost no graphics. It doesn't need them. The forum could be more flexible but basically it works. The tune archive is very badly designed and I never use it.

www.footstompin.com has some godawful bugs which have never been fixed despite the admins knowing about them for years. It's not as fast as thesession but reasonable considering its design goals (promoting a commercial enterprise). Unfortunately the coding bugs and their attitude to them are so bad there's no way in hell I'd ever trust their site with my card details, which makes it rather an own-goal as a marketing tool.

Mudcat, on this browser, is the clunkiest of all, frequently loading too slowly to use or locking my whole machine up. Unless I disable Javascript, in which case it's the zippiest and most reliable web forum I've ever used. Disabling Javascript also means I see almost no adverts. Own-goal in a different way.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 07:26 PM

The "Fooles Troupe Home" site - Google it :-) has several different VERY simple styles, each one deliberately chosen for each different section for visual contrast. ALL the code was handwritten in Notepad (or other similar simple text editors, some with the ability to code check in colour, or add HTML constructs with simple keypress macros!)

I tried using several of those 'assistance' programs, but the code generated could often be up to 10 times longer, making it damn near impossible to find and fix minor changes later on, especially when one no longer had access to those original useless pieces of crap! And if you CHANGED the 'assistance' SW, the results could be horrendous, as each one 'improved' the existing crap it found to start with .... so I stripped it all out by hand (global search and replace!) and kept it simple, using the standard defaults.

The whole couple of hundred pages of code of the FT site runs at about 3.5 Megabyte - including all the graphics and music files!


One of the tricks was to UNDERSTAND HTML - and USE THE defined DEFAULTS - which most of these piles of crap insist on spelling out, sometimes in subtly differing ways 'for improvement!' - thus massively bloating the code unnecessarily. This can be a trap when the clever bastards insist on using the Microsoft 'non-standard' way of doing things, which changes in the next version! Giving an ignorant fool a 'simple' tool to fiddle about with concepts he does not really understand, is not always helpful! :-)

I actually once found a 4 Kb block of code (which looked like it may have originally come from a scanned input!) that coded a horizontal dash in ASCII (instead of using the HTML Code) for a line to separate paragraphs and did everything ignoring defaults, even having a different color code (subtle different shade of black) for each "-" in the line! This block was repeated many times in the whole document.

Without being intentionally insulting to the Mudcat, I note that there are also examples of similar sort of bloat in the Mudcat, but then it has been generated via a package too, and accesses a database ...

On a really big project, it may be necessary to use such tools, I will say.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 07:32 PM

"The whole couple of hundred pages of code of the FT site runs at about 3.5 Megabyte - including all the graphics and music files!"

Oh and I used to get occasional complaints about the site being too slow to load on dialup! :-) But I once did get congratulations from one guy on dialup using something like a 486 with DOS, saying that it worked for him and ran ok on dialup! :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 12 Sep 10 - 07:39 PM

"Unless I disable Javascript"

MC works fast and well for me, but then I use Firefox and ImageLikeOpera which kills the unwanted graphics & NoScript which kills JS - so no ads to worry me! :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Manitas_at_home
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 05:48 AM

One good point about not bringing discussions back to the front is that it tends to keep threads short.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 06:23 AM

two other bad design glitches on www .session .org, are the following, the frequent loss of posts into cyber space,particularly if it is a verbose post, this must have happened a dozen times.
but much worse is the events section, i posted an event for Ballydehob jazz festival, and it crashed into Ballydehob trad festival, Because i weanted to use the option [various venues], so you cant list a town that has two festivals,AND USE VARIOUS VENUES if another festivalin the same town has already done so in the same town that is a real crap design.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 07:57 AM

concertina net, is much better designed, no post glitches, there is the abilty to edit posts, no loss of posts in cyber space and a much better designed events section.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: treewind
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 08:35 AM

The forum on concertina.net is based on a ready-made content management system. It looks as if thesession.org is hand-coded.

There's not much point these days in coding your own web based forum - there so many good free CMS to choose from, and they have most of the common needs provided and the bugs fixed. It's interesting to reflect that if Mudcat started from scratch now it wouldn't be done the same way - it would just take too long.

Anahata

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 08:46 AM

I tried searching for "Fooles Troupe" and all I could find was a Myspace site. Is that it? (I'm not looking at anything there!)

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 09:02 AM

http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~rhayes/vfoolshm.htm

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 09:55 AM

Thanks. Fine but a bit TOO simple in one way: you autoplay and loop MIDI files on each page. Unfortunately opening a linked page in a new window or tab doesn't turn the old page's music off, and the result is a sort of "Charles Ives does the Middle Ages".

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: katlaughing
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 02:11 PM

I just did a re-design of mine using Site Delux at startlogic.com. There are more things I will add, but I couldn't stand what I had up, too busy, so I've gone for a look of more simplicity: katlfrance.com. I WILL be adding better/more content to the home page.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 03:13 PM

Kat: No DOCTYPE, and the site uses Javascript without saying so, so you don't know what you might be missing if you have JS disabled (as I do).

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: katlaughing
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 04:10 PM

Sorry, Jack, what does no DOCTYPE mean? And, how do I notify it uses javascript? Or, I'll go ask startlogic about the latter. Thanks!

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 04:37 PM

The DOCTYPE declaration should be the very first thing on the page. It tells the browser what kind of HTML you're using. A lot of packaged systems omit it.

Leaving it out may not make much difference to the way most users see your site, since browsers generally guess, but it makes it next to impossible to debug your code, since debugging tools will spit out a vast number of error messages, most of which amount to "I can't be sure what this means" - so you can't see the real problems in the flood.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: katlaughing
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 05:16 PM

Ah, well I can toggle to html to see what the code is for each page, so I'll look for that and add it if possible. Thanks!

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 06:26 PM

"a bit TOO simple in one way: you autoplay and loop MIDI files on each page."

That WAS the Design Intent. True, some don't like that.... actually - that is not on every page - I ran out of usable files long before that. They are on various 'main' pages.

"Unfortunately opening a linked page in a new window or tab doesn't turn the old page's music off"

Didn't use to do that - but then it was written years ago, and SW has changed since then....

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Nick
Date: 13 Sep 10 - 06:48 PM

GSS - why not just contact Jeremy at the session.org and tell him? I'm sure he would appreciate the input.

Could it be that you would like the ability to edit your entries so that you after get banned for your input you could then remove it? I frequent some sites where you can constantly revise and re-edit your input and that can really make for some bizarre threads where people refer to and react to things that haven't been said!

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 14 Sep 10 - 01:32 PM

I have contacted JEREMY times several times, and pointed out the inadequacies of his website., he takes it as someone trying to tell him how to run his site.
here is an example of a response from jeremy.
Don't you, of all people, tell me how to run my site.

Jeremy

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Nick
Date: 14 Sep 10 - 06:57 PM

Having met him in real life and read your posts (are you yx on session.org as well as GSS here by the way?) here I can totally understand why he might say that.

Do you ever come and play music round the York area then I could form a view of your area of expertise?

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 05:16 AM

He was yz but that name seems to have vanished. Haven't seen an obvious Dick post for a while but then I don't check every thread!

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 07:40 AM

Nick,
I have been earning my living playing music for over 35 years, singing playing concertina and guitar plus writing my own songs, Iwas in a band called the new mexborough english concertina quartet, which did play at york folk club , I have also been booked as a solo artist at diferent york folk clubs[ at least two different ones including the one at the black swan ].
I was recently[july] booked at scarborough[which is in the york area] maritime festival , in fact i have been booked there several times, I have played at ryedale folk festival, robin hoods bay folk club, whitby folk club, kiveton park folk club within the last two years ALL IN YORKSHIRE.
I have also been booked at Topic Bradford.
If you search you tube music dickmiles music there are videos of my concertina playing my guitar playing my singing and a couple of my songs.
however, why, do you need to know about my playing , I am being critical of a website design ,I dont understand, what is the relevance of playing expertise when it comes to website design.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 08:25 AM

I dont understand, what is the relevance of playing expertise when it comes to website design.

It isn't very relevant. But all Jeremy knows about you is what you write. That is somewhat relevant to website design, since in coding and running a website you have to both get the details right and think about how you come across to your readers. You come across as someone who can't edit his way out of a wet paper bag and doesn't care how difficult his writing is to make sense of. So why should Jeremy pay any attention to your suggestions?

Nick was pointing out that it would have given you a bit more credibility if you demonstrated that you were good at something, even if writing wasn't it.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: treewind
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 09:22 AM

No DOCTYPE means you probably never went to http://validator.w3.org/ to check your code, but then if it's been generated by a software package (a)it's probably near impossible to correct HTML errors and (b) it will hopefully avoid the obvious mistakes like missing closing tags or wrongly nested elements.
Presence or absence of DOCTYPE declaration is used by some versions of MS IE to decide whether to behave in standard-compliant or broken-old-MS-browser mode when interpreting certain CSS properties - in other words, it can change the shape of your page.

"I have contacted JEREMY times several times, and pointed out the inadequacies of his website..."
How to win friends and influence people... I wouldn't appreciate that treatment either, unless it was something seriously wrong like a major factual error or a broken link.

Anahata

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 09:49 AM

jack campin,
jeremy should pay attention to my suggestions, because they are valid criticisms, there are problems with the events section,i9n the discussion site, there is no editing facilty, posts disappear into cyber space, the posts cannot be recalled once they get over a certain age, all these facilities are available at a well designed website like concertina net.
my abilty to edit is irrelevant, I am a member of a forum, I Have problems with certain aspects of that forum., the form owner if he is adecent website designmer should be able to correct the problems
nick[ not jeremy] questioned my expertise,if he visited my website or attended my frequent gigs in the yorkshire area,or visted dickmiles music he would hear i am good at a number of things.
singing , playing concertina , guitar playing and writing songs, [Jack can you do any of those things?]
but again expertise is not relevant, music critics criticise other peoples music without beimnng able to play a note, so i dont have to be a website designer to see faults in a website.
treewind,I am not interested in making friends with jeremy, but i am interested in being able to put up events on a forum, without them being messed up, when i experience a website problem i expect a website designer to be able to rectify the problem, but the problems are not rectified months later.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 09:53 AM

"I am not interested in making friends with jeremy"

So why have you called yourself after him? Heheh!

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: katlaughing
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 09:57 AM

Thanks, Anahata, that helps me to understand it more and I will check with that website. Appreciate it.

Dick, it seems, from what you write, that you haven't received any satisfaction, in your opinion, from the other site, so you started this thread to complain about it, though there is nothing any of us can do about that other website. I could understand starting this thread IF it were about poorly designed websites in general, but if all you want to do is complain at that one and get into it with other members here, I would suggest that you let it go.

kat - moderator

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: The Sandman
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 09:57 AM

"Nick was pointing out that it would have given you a bit more credibility if you demonstrated that you were good at something, even if writing wasn't it"
another example of Jacks lack of knowledge and ignorance.
Jack some people like the songs I have written, some of them have even performed my songs, Bill Prince, Johnny Collins, Al Whittle, Monkeys fist,Ramskyte, among others.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 11:07 AM

Nick was pointing out that it would have given you a bit more credibility if you demonstrated that you were good at something, even if writing wasn't it
another example of Jacks lack of knowledge and ignorance.
Jack some people like the songs I have written, some of them have even performed my songs, Bill Prince, Johnny Collins, Al Whittle, Monkeys fist,Ramskyte, among others.

Nick hadn't heard you. (Whereas I have, albeit only on YouTube, and only when doing other people's songs). What I've heard isn't the point - you are not a total unknown, but neither are you a legend whose work everybody (Jeremy included) could be expected to know. And the way you write on web forums doesn't exactly encourage people to investigate.

You haven't done quite as badly as Al Whittle, though. He came across as such an arrogant arsehole here that I decided never to listen to any of his work. (Of the people you list, the only other one I know is Billy Prince, who is a nice bloke both in print and in person).

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Bill D
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 11:26 AM

I have been using The Proxomitron for 7-8 years to control javascript, as well as many, many other things(including target=blank), which I detest. Some of the recent add-ons for Firefox are just now getting around to doing what Proxomitron has been doing for years. It takes a little time to tweak it to suit, but default 'out of the box' settings are pretty good.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Jack Campin
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 11:56 AM

The Proxomitron page isn't exactly forthcoming about what platforms it takes to run it. Is it Windows-only and running on a client, does it run on a standalone Linux gateway box, or what?

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Nick
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 01:17 PM

Dick - I sent you a PM which needs no reply in public.

You are a fine singer and performer I'm sure and I have heard your stuff.

I work in an environment (software - different area) where part of the job is to constantly weed out what is a personal bee in a bonnet from something that really matters to the software.

The bizarre bit for me - and made me giggle - was getting banned from forums and expecting that people should change the forum/website to suit you.

Most of my comments after that were probably a bit of a wind up. Anahata hit the nail on the head as did Jack.

The two priceless comments were Jeremy's comment to you "Don't you, of all people, tell me how to run my site" - why did he say the 'of all people' and the throw away line "yes, I am banned from concertina net,".

Wrongly from my end I was just in a crabby mood and shouldn't have wound you up.

Gill and you are the only two suspended people on session. Gill is something of a legend and institution though. I often wondered whether he might have been Jeremy. :) (I know it's not the case)

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: katlaughing
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 01:24 PM

Dick has indicated, to me by PM, that he is going to let this go, so howzabout the rest of us keep going with the bad website design in general suggestion I made earlier?

Thanks,

kat as mod, again:-)

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Bill D
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 01:44 PM

Sorry Jack... as far as I knew, the Proxomitron is Windows only.

But Google leads this way & that. I am currently trying to learn more about Linux, so I will have explore a bit myself.

Subject: RE: BS: Badly Designed Websites
From: Nick
Date: 15 Sep 10 - 02:11 PM

Kat - an observation, not a criticism as it may well be by design.

Your site looks nice and works fine but does have an inconsistency of typeface across the pages that I couldn't really understand. It may be that that is by design but it made it harder to read from my point of view. I found it hard to work out why some bits were in some fonts and others in different ones; and I couldn't see what was the consistency and relevance of italics - in some places it seemed to be to makes contrasts and other bits didn't. It's a small point and may not matter but type between pages (and consistency of headings and style etc) does aid comprehension and readability. At least it shouldn't raise questions in the readers mind like 'I wonder why this page is in a different type face - am I missing something' which gets in the way.