New Website - update!

[Bob Gillanders]

My apologies, this announcement was due last week, but nevertheless,

The contract has been signed with Resolution Interactive Media of London, ON to build our new web site.

Patrick Smale, President of EKG, will be the project leader for the CFC. A select sample group of CFC members will be working with Patrick on usability issues, as the project goes along through the design phase. Preliminary target finish date is Mar 15th, 2011. We will keep you posted on progress along the way.

For samples of work by ResolutionIM please visit http://www.resolutionim.com/#portfolio

At long last, light at the end of this incredibly long tunnel.

[Ed Seedhouse]

For samples of work by ResolutionIM please visit http://www.resolutionim.com/#portfolio

Oh dear. I'm afraid these are all rather terrible, and replete with bad coding practice with many useability issues.

At long last, light at the end of this incredibly long tunnel.

I am afraid not. Their home page might as well have been written with the purpose to drive older folks with weakish eyesite away never to return, as were the portfolio sites I visited. One of them took minutes to load!

All of them were full of nasty html errors indicitave of a very sloppy approach.

I think you should reconsider your choice now, and get someone who understands how the web works to help you. You have fallen for pretty, always a huge mistake.

I think the dark tunnel now extends for a very long way indeed.

[Fred McKim]

Oh dear. I'm afraid these are all rather terrible, and replete with bad coding practice with many useability issues.



I am afraid not. Their home page might as well have been written with the purpose to drive older folks with weakish eyesite away never to return, as were the portfolio sites I visited. One of them took minutes to load!

All of them were full of nasty html errors indicitave of a very sloppy approach.

I think you should reconsider your choice now, and get someone who understands how the web works to help you. You have fallen for pretty, always a huge mistake.

I think the dark tunnel now extends for a very long way indeed.

Ed if you can send me an e-mail with your concerns, I'll forward it along to our project manager. Despite your comments, I have full confidence in our choice.

[John Coleman]

Oh dear. I'm afraid these are all rather terrible, and replete with bad coding practice with many useability issues.

Their home page might as well have been written with the purpose to drive older folks with weakish eyesite away never to return, as were the portfolio sites I visited. One of them took minutes to load!

Same thought here. I wouldn't waste much time on this dog's breakfast. I'm one of the old folks with weakish eyesight, what is the purpose of having bouncing images and blurry backgrounds. One of their portfolio pages, the Cambrian College site map, took so long to load that I thought my computer had crashed. http://www.cambriancollege.ca/Pages/Sitemap.aspx It's just a page of links, why should it take a month to load?

[Bob Gillanders]

It's just a page of links, why should it take a month to load?

John, my computer - 1 second to load! Maybe you need a new computer?

[John Coleman]

Just checked,

5 seconds, BBC news http://news.bbc.co.uk/

4 seconds, NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/?excamp=GGGNnewyorktimes

34 seconds, Cambrian College sitemap http://www.cambriancollege.ca/Pages/Sitemap.aspx

I think those programmers need less beer and hot-and-ready pizza. Or more...

[John Coleman]

John, my computer - 1 second to load! Maybe you need a new computer?

Could be, it's a 2007 dual something or other, running Vista. My ad-blocker probably slows down commercial websites. However, is the CFC website only going to be for people with the latest hardware?

Maybe this is a business opportunity for the CFC, start selling computers!

[Kerry Liles]

John, my computer - 1 second to load! Maybe you need a new computer?

More likely a different internet connection. I suspect problems with time to load are related to internet traffic issues rather than the content of the site (there could be exceptions, but most home pages are deliberately "lean" so they normally load quickly.

I am certain the new website will cause howls of outrage and cries of "off with their head" (especially considering the reaction so far - lol) but there is no doubt these people know what they are doing.

The hard part is to make sure the CFC has communicated their needs properly so that the CFC's requirements are met. If you have no requirements then any website will do.

[Ed Seedhouse]

Their portfolio page uses teensy tiny fonts that I can barely read and wastes tons of screen space on an irrelevant and annoying graphic. Has six HTML coding errors and 108 CSS coding errors. This belies an unproffesional approach and is the equivalent of not subjecting your term paper to a spell check. Moving through the menus the screen jumps around crazily for about two seconds on each page before settling down to as close to readibility as it gets.

This is a piss poor web site and gives me no confidence that they can do it right.

All in all just a look at their home page would convince me to stay a million miles away from them as web designers.

As for their "portfolio" I checked the top three, which was as much as I could stand.

The "London Health Sciences Center" website takes forever to load and then plays sound at me, an unacceptable web practice that overrides whatever music I might happen to be playing at the time on my system.

The "Samsonite Canada" site uses fonts too small for me to read and plays an unwelcome animation at me. Enough to make me leave forever and not return. Seventy four (!) CSS syntax errors and a couple of html errors.

Hudson Boat Works - largely unreadible to me without magnification. Thirty five HTML syntax errors and seven CSS errors.

All of these sites waste tons of screen space which could be used to present useful, accessible, and interesting content. They use fixed width elements and that's a practice that should have gone out with the 1990's. All of them use low contrast and teeny fonts which seem to be based on a belief that only teenagers will want to view their sites.

No, I am sorry, if you let these people have their way the result is going to be worse than what you have now, and that's saying a lot.

If you are going to go with them nevertheless, you should insist on a contract that requires them to:

1. Use maximum possible contrast on all pages.

2. Set the base font size for each page to 100% or 1em and not impose choices of fonts on the visitor.

3. Do not use the Verdana font on any page, period.

4. Ideally, set the font stack to "font-family: sans-serif;" for normal text and "font-family: serif;" for all headers (H1 through H6). NO non standard web fonts.

5. Use the full screen with of every visitor's browser, easily attainable with proper use of html and CSS. If they can't do that, fire them and get someone who can.

6. Require every page to be written in HTML 4.01 STRICT, and to validate 100% in the W3C validators for both HTML and CSS. I can live with XHTML 1.0 STRICT but it is a second best choice since with the situation on the web today it will in fact be served as HTML, not XHTML.

And 7, last but NOT least, the site should be useable by unsited users and tested and certified to be so.

It is perfectly possible to create a great and good looking web site within those rules and if they can't do that then don't give them the job.

If you already have the contract signed then, oh dear.

[Jonathan Berry]

Same thought here. I wouldn't waste much time on this dog's breakfast. I'm one of the old folks with weakish eyesight, what is the purpose of having bouncing images and blurry backgrounds. One of their portfolio pages, the Cambrian College site map, took so long to load that I thought my computer had crashed. http://www.cambriancollege.ca/Pages/Sitemap.aspx It's just a page of links, why should it take a month to load?

Took 7 seconds to load here. Firefox, Win 7, Shaw cable internet.

I went to one of their other sites (Perth County) and yes the typesize is small. Ctrl+ a few times fixed that. But of course, they'd make the default scaling larger and keep visibility issues at the forefront on request--one would hope!!