Thursday 16 February 2006

Competition!

Those who follow the comments might already have seen Bill Rammell's website. Bill is Labour MP for Harlow and the Under Secretary of State for Education (or some such which, I can never remember the titles in these quasi-Masonic groups).

Here is the competition and it's in two parts:

Part 1 - Find, on Mr Rammell's home page (only!) - one web design principle that the page doesn't ignore.

Part 2 - Find a site as happy to ignore design quality as this and post the link.

Not an easy competition I'm sure you'll agree but five "nogbad points" for the winner! :-)

18 careful considerations:

Anonymous said...

1. He did the doc type declaration,
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"

Yes. I had to resort to code scraping to find something. Every rule - broken.

2. Just eye-watering. Not bad design as such.
http://www.swhertslibdems.org.uk/

vw:ayfygw

def: Whut yas poots yas cee dees in too in Noo Cassel, man!

Nogbad said...

Good try! I ran the page through a validator against HTML 4.0 Trans and it throws 56 errors and 33 warnings.

That LibDem page is truly a site for sore eyes - look at it for any length of time and you'll certainly get sore eyes :-)

Nogbad said...

And W3C throws it out too Validation results

kat said...

Scroll down to the bottom and on the right hand side there is an option to up the text size. Good idea for those who don't realise that this could be done in the browswer but any poor bugger trying to read this site would have given up, and rubbed their bloodshot eyes, way before they got down to the bottom of the page. (Going off for an eye bath.)

'Tis such a shame that there isn't an option to change the entire page.

bluefluff said...

I got one, I got one!

Part 1:
"Keep image file sizes small, to speed up download times"
(OK so it only applies to the Labour rose logo not his own 765K mugshot, but hey - I was struggling!)

Part 2: Langdon Winner's homepage
You'd expect a Professor in a US university science & technology dept, who pontificates about "technoglobalism's assault on education", to have a less embarrassingly deficient grasp of how (not) to use frames.

bluefluff said...

P.S. He really needs to Do Something about the declining standards of numeracy in this country - catch the red revolving boast to have solved the problems of "10,00" constitutents!

kat said...

Bluefluff - I don't think you can claim anything for part one. The rose logo isn't his own - It's been nicked from somewhere else. The small file size is an accident rather than a design strategy. If it was his own it would be huge.
:-)

bluefluff said...

Boo hiss, Kat ;-)
Actually I feel worse about putting a typo in my criticism of Rammell's standards of numeracy. Oops!

Nogbad said...

Looks like a tough competition this one! I agree that the size of the logo isn't down to him and while the text resizer is a neat inclusion I seriously doubt that many people would want that page any larger.

You've sent me to Winner's page before BF and I agree, it's another worthy contender isn't it?

Lobster Blogster said...

1. Mr Rammell has set the backgound colour*, thus ensuring his design is displayed in a consistent way irrespective of browser settings.

*Apart from the last panel, where Mr Rammell prefers the viewer's own individuality to show through.

2. All of my own webpages are just as bad, but I'm too shy to post a link.

Echomouse said...

I'm just sitting here wondering how the hell I managed to end up in a group of geniuses and why you let me stay. LOL

I've got no idea about this stuff. But hey, LOBSTER IS BACK! I think?

Echomouse said...

Okay I'm back because, this is pure fluke mind you, I found this:-

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/

Is that sort of what y'all are talking about? lol

Nogbad said...

I've just looked at the css used on that site ad I can confirm that the author hasn't grasped the basics of cascading style sheets either. 27 classes declared and each starts by declaring the same set of fonts rather than declaring that once and letting this cascade down (the clue being in the question as it were). The crime is compounded by the number of redundant font settings in the page code itself.

Lobster has clearly been away sharpening his debating skills and I'd be tempted to agree with his analysis except the background colour isn't set at all! The table cell properties give the wonderfully soft pink and blues and such like and also hard code the table width to 800 without any idea to show it in the middle of the screen rather than scrunched up on the left (though this might be a political statement!). The image used in the main pane is okay but on my screen I have waves of white which would be far better toned down to at least #fefefe to save those whose eyes bleed when looking at so much white space.

But anyway Lobster - where ya been?

Lobster Blogster said...

Crawling around on the bottom of the sea - how about you?

Bill said...

Nigel, have you checked your own website with the W3C validator recently?

Nogbad said...

No of course not Bill!

robotjam said...

This is my all time favourite

businesslink

Possibly the most stinking site I have come across in a long while.

robotjam said...

You have to go in and browse around a bit, the horror gets even worse when you get inside.