Outrage! Monday evening, 2 October 2006

I recently wrote on Taking Web Agencies Forward summing up the vital lack of understanding that many companies that make a living developing websites have when it comes to the web.

The £175,000 pile of rubbish that is the DTI’s website simply fills me with dismay! The idea was to get a new site that was accessible. The result was a table based layout, (including spacer gifs, I kid you not), useful alt attributes like ‘*’, gratuitous inline JavaScript (complete with browser sniffing)...

For anyone who is ever tasked with the responsibility of hiring web designers/developers and has a conscience, here are some tips that will help you avoid the duds. The first step is to go the prospective company’s website, right click on the home page, and select ‘view source’. Search for the following tell tell signs.

  1. Search for ‘onmouseover=’ and ‘onclick=’. Find anything? You probably want to look else where.
  2. Search for ‘align="center"’ (possibly with single quotes). Find anything? You probably want to look else where.
  3. Do a search for ‘bgcolor=’. Find anything? Do not hire this company.
  4. Do a search for ‘spacer.gif’. Find anything? Do not hire this company.
  5. Do a search for ‘function MM_=’. Find anything? Do not hire this company.
  6. Do a search for ‘<font>’. Find anything? Do not even consider hiring this company ever. Forbid them from submitting tenders.

In case you’re wondering, the people that designed the DTI site (Fresh01) did all of these except the last one.

 

Comments

Simon

Those seem fair.

On 4 October

 

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