We’re building an absolutely beastly site for a client (who shall remain nameless) at the moment. They’ve made the mistake of hiring a graphic design company (who shall also remain nameless) to do the layout for them – a graphic design company who seemingly know absolutely nothing about web design. Their crimes against the net so far include…
- Insisting the entire site appear in a popup window.
- Having additional pages pop up in additional windows, and getting annoyed when we point out why this is stupid.
- Getting annoyed when we point out that even if we do set up additional pop up windows, there’s nothing in the design allowing people to get back to the original popup window.
- Demanding that all the pages are laid out exactly the same, then sending through individual page layouts whose elements are wildly out of alignment with each other.
- Insisting all the text be rendered as graphics, regardless of the effect this will have on the search engines.
- Sending through all the graphics as crappy GIF files, then getting annoyed when we ask for PSDs.
- Getting annoyed and snarky that we dare to phone them up and ask any questions at all.
They seem to think that they’re the high and mighty priests of design, and we should humbly bow and grovel at their feet, never daring to doubt their judgements on the rightness of things. Well, too bad people – we’re engineers, it’s our job to know what can and can’t be done, and we don’t stand for this kind of crap.
In addition to this, what text there is on the site is the most florid, ridiculous, over the top… look I’ll just include an example,
As simple as the beauty of the impassioned glow of a sunset, casting rosy light onto vines that stand in anticipation of promised fruit, such are our beliefs at [Company].
It’s like they’ve bought copywriting services from Edward Bulwer-Lytton!
Bah!!
