Good Web Sites Gone Bad
A couple of months ago my ISP did something really strange. They took a perfectly good working home page for their site and replaced it with Flash. Fortunately they left one ordinary web link on their page that takes you to a copy of their old home page or I would have been forced to look for a new host. Certainly this stupidity on their part means that I would no longer consider recommending them to anyone else.As I have a Flash blocker installed in my browser, all I see when I visit their home page now is a big F in the middle of the screen and the single link is concealed at the bottom of the page. That F obviously stands for a four letter word followed by another three letter word which is what most people used to do when confronted with Flash intro pages on the front of sites.
I guess using Flash as a home page to drive people away has become so rare lately because people stopped doing such stupid things that some people have now forgotten how stupid it is. Now I don’t know if their home page is just a fancy intro/go away page or actually contains an interactive page that just happens to be written in Flash.
Either way I have no intention of looking to see and Flash as a home page is a big “get lost” sign regardless of what it contains. By all means have internal pages that use Flash alongside your regular web pages for those who want to visit a web page rather than a Flash page but don’t make your home page entirely out of Flash. It seems really weird that a company involved in providing WEB access has stopped using a web page for their home page and now uses Flash instead. Fortunately the rest of their site is F free or I would be looking for a new ISP. The next time they do something this stupid I will be looking to move providers.
As I said, this happened a couple of months ago. My reason for mentioning it now is that a second site that I visit regularly has just done something almost as stupid. No they haven’t replaced their home page with a huge F. What they have done is to redesign their page layout and have come up with a really ridiculous layout. As I don’t have my browser open full screen (since I have a couple of rows of icons down the left of the screen that I like to be able to access as needed), when I view the page I end up with a horizontal scrollbar as well as the vertical one. Now I have my screen set to a fairly high resolution so that even though my browser isn’t open full screen the available width is still about 1000 pixels or so. I suspect that this means that they are using JavaScript inappropriately to set the page layout based on the screen dimensions instead of the browser dimensions. Some of the other changes in the functionality lead me to believe that their site is heavily dependent on some absolutely attrocious JavaScript that was probably cobbled together last week but which should have been totally replaced at least 5 years ago with something that actually works properly. I’ll be checking their site out further over the next few days to see whether I will continue visiting there or will be telling them where to go (or may be I should just offer my services to redesign the garbage that they now call their web site into something that works properly. Going back to their old version would be a minor improvement but then that had a really ancient browser sensing script that never worked properly since it relied on a user enterable field containing a specific value.
Tags: flash, isp, javascript, ordinary web link, regular web pages, WEB access, web design