I just found an interesting website.

[Chaddy2222]

Hi all.
I just found an interesting site, well the site itself is kind of average
but one of the services is interesting.
http://www.thesagewreath.com.au/index_files/Page1279.htm
They are a business that make soap and stuff but they claim to offer web
design as well! I was not quite sure what to think and then I looked at the
source code, an MS Word site for only $450.... WTF!.
This really only proves that companies really should spend the money and
hire a pro (who knows what they are doing) to design their website.
On that note, what on earth is with the file name they have used for that
page, is that some kind of MS-Word setting or something?.
The mind boggles.

 

[cwdjrxyz]

Hi all.
I just found an interesting site, well the site itself is kind of average
but one of the services is interesting.http://www.thesagewreath.com.au/index_files/Page1279.htm
They are a business that make soap and stuff but they claim to offer web
design as well! I was not quite sure what to think and then I looked at the
source code, an MS Word site for only $450.... WTF!.
This really only proves that companies really should spend the money and
hire a pro (who knows what they are doing) to design their website.
On that note, what on earth is with the file name they have used for that
page, is that some kind of MS-Word setting or something?.
The mind boggles.

That site is sort of like an old fashioned country store. They are
still lacking food and clothing, but perhaps that comes next . Or
perhaps adding web design makes up for that lack and brings the
concept up to date . The business reminds me a bit of the Vermont
Country Store in the US, which has been around for ages, but they now
also have a web site. Retailers are selling some unusual items on the
web these days. One huge national chain discount store in the US has
now added coffins to their web site. I wonder how many they sell.

 

[nice.guy.nige]

While the city slept, cwdjrxyz ([email protected]) feverishly typed...

One huge national chain discount store in the US has
now added coffins to their web site. I wonder how many they sell.

It's a dying trade... ;-)

Cheers,
Nige

 

[Neredbojias]

That site is sort of like an old fashioned country store. They are
still lacking food and clothing, but perhaps that comes next . Or
perhaps adding web design makes up for that lack and brings the
concept up to date . The business reminds me a bit of the Vermont
Country Store in the US, which has been around for ages, but they now
also have a web site. Retailers are selling some unusual items on the
web these days. One huge national chain discount store in the US has
now added coffins to their web site. I wonder how many they sell.

Well, I bought one, but I had it sent to Sydney.

 

[dorayme]

coffins

Well, I bought one, but I had it sent to Sydney.

I hope you did not forget to get inside. I look forward to
preparing your body. I have been doing this for a hobby ever
since I saw the nice film: Plots with a View

 

[WindsorFox]

That site is sort of like an old fashioned country store. They are
still lacking food and clothing, but perhaps that comes next . Or
perhaps adding web design makes up for that lack and brings the
concept up to date . The business reminds me a bit of the Vermont
Country Store in the US, which has been around for ages, but they now
also have a web site. Retailers are selling some unusual items on the
web these days. One huge national chain discount store in the US has
now added coffins to their web site. I wonder how many they sell.

Vermont country store. Be it known, that if you DARE order from
Vermont Country Store online and provide an email address for your
receipt and tracking, you WILL get bombarded forever after with ads EVEN
IF YOU UNCHECK THE OPT-IN BOX! You will receive ads before you receive
your order confirmation, and when you use a different email address to
complain about it THAT email address will begin to be spammed as well. I
had to call the store and get an owner and get ugly and nasty before my
email got clean again. They may be nice people and have a lot of neat
stuff, but they do not understand email privacy and whoever they pay to
handle the online marketing are even more clueless. Just a note of
personal experience.

 

[Travis Newbury]

MS Word site for only $450.... WTF!.
This really only proves that companies really should spend the money and
hire a pro (who knows what they are doing) to design their website.

Playing the devils advocate for a second. Why does this prove you
should go to a pro? Because they use Word? The site works fine in FF
and IE. This is what, 90%-95% of your visitors? The design [look and
feel] is no worse than other "pro" examples I have seen proclaimed
here. Looks like the employees are all old(er) people too, but the
fact that it completely falls apart if you change the font size does
not seem to matter to them.

It gets the job done. And to a company on a budget that has no
website, $450.00, can be just what they need.

 

[Jerry Stuckle]

MS Word site for only $450.... WTF!.
This really only proves that companies really should spend the money and
hire a pro (who knows what they are doing) to design their website.

Playing the devils advocate for a second. Why does this prove you
should go to a pro? Because they use Word? The site works fine in FF
and IE. This is what, 90%-95% of your visitors? The design [look and
feel] is no worse than other "pro" examples I have seen proclaimed
here. Looks like the employees are all old(er) people too, but the
fact that it completely falls apart if you change the font size does
not seem to matter to them.

It gets the job done. And to a company on a budget that has no
website, $450.00, can be just what they need.

I might have a rusty 1970 Ford Pinto to get me around. It would "work",
and it would be "cheap", but I wouldn't want to take a customer to
lunch in it.

Your website is a reflection on your business. A good website reflects
well on your company. And a poor website reflects poorly.


--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
(e-mail address removed)
==================

 

[Travis Newbury]

Your website is a reflection on your business. A good website reflects
well on your company. And a poor website reflects poorly.

My point exactly. To the casual surfer (read that as almost everyone
but a professional web designer) that website looks and works
perfectly fine. No one going to that site looking for soap will look
at the source code and say

"Damn this company has shitty HTML code! SON OF A BITCH! They used
WORD and not Notepad!!! I am going to their competitor!!!!"

To you, a professional, yes it [technically] sucks, to my mom, who is
looking to buy soap, and wouldn't know how to view the source code if
her life depended on it, it looks and works fine. And she will buy
the soap.

A "good" website is one that helps your business regardless of how it
was built or who built it.

 

[Patrick]

Your website is a reflection on your business. A good website reflects
well on your company. And a poor website reflects poorly.

My point exactly. To the casual surfer (read that as almost everyone
but a professional web designer) that website looks and works
perfectly fine. No one going to that site looking for soap will look
at the source code and say

"Damn this company has shitty HTML code! SON OF A BITCH! They used
WORD and not Notepad!!! I am going to their competitor!!!!"

To you, a professional, yes it [technically] sucks, to my mom, who is
looking to buy soap, and wouldn't know how to view the source code if
her life depended on it, it looks and works fine. And she will buy
the soap.

A "good" website is one that helps your business regardless of how it
was built or who built it.

Remind me to pay more attention to what Travis has to say in posts. He
makes a lot of sense.

P.

--
Patrick A. Smith Assistant System Administrator
Ocean Circulation Group – USF - College of Marine Science
http://ocgweb.marine.usf.edu Phone: 727 553-3334

The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody
appreciates how difficult it was. - La Rochefoucauld

 

[Chaddy2222]

Your website is a reflection on your business. A good website reflects
well on your company. And a poor website reflects poorly.

My point exactly. To the casual surfer (read that as almost everyone
but a professional web designer) that website looks and works
perfectly fine. No one going to that site looking for soap will look
at the source code and say

"Damn this company has shitty HTML code! SON OF A BITCH! They used
WORD and not Notepad!!! I am going to their competitor!!!!"

To you, a professional, yes it [technically] sucks, to my mom, who is
looking to buy soap, and wouldn't know how to view the source code if
her life depended on it, it looks and works fine. And she will buy
the soap.

A "good" website is one that helps your business regardless of how it
was built or who built it.

I agree to a point with what you are saying. However the main point I
was trying to make is that as a company offering web design services,
they should have some idea of good practice when it come to web
authoring, you need to understand all about Do and charsets and a
range of other factors, here in Australia web accessibility is yet
another of these issues as it's law! It's in the DDA that websites
need to be accessible. You also need to know about other issues such
as the fact that not all web surfers use the same Operating system
(OS). You can't just slap a nice looking page on a web server and
expect it to just work!.

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

My point exactly. To the casual surfer (read that as almost everyone
but a professional web designer) that website looks and works
perfectly fine. No one going to that site looking for soap will look
at the source code and say

"Damn this company has shitty HTML code! SON OF A BITCH! They used
WORD and not Notepad!!! I am going to their competitor!!!!"

Ah therein lies the rub, they rarely work well. As with said example is
flooded with MS BS:

<!--[if gte vml 1]><v:rect id="_x0000_s1173"
style='position:absolute;left:0;
top:123pt;width:132.82pt;height:450pt;z-index:17;visibility:visible;
mso-wrap-edited:f;mso-wrap-distance-left:2.88pt;mso-wrap-distance-top:2.88pt;
mso-wrap-distance-right:2.88pt;mso-wrap-distance-bottom:2.88pt'
fillcolor="#ffebae [2 lighten(102)]"
....

that mega-bloat of the code where the mere markup excluding images can
be unbelievable! That simple page is 60K without the images and if done
properly would be under 2K, only 30x bloat! Now if the page had any
significant amount of content it would not take much imagination to
guess how it would load on dialup.

Next, even though the example page:

http://www.thesagewreath.com.au/index_files/Page1279.htm

looks decent, it completely borks if you change the text size...so
access ability is out the window. And since most of the content reads as
comments does it even work with a screen reader?

And how about my friend's infamous site, a true MS Publisher marvel!
Thankfully it is not longer up, www.redskyibizans.com. To any anyone
without IE you got a blank grey page!

To you, a professional, yes it [technically] sucks, to my mom, who is
looking to buy soap, and wouldn't know how to view the source code if
her life depended on it, it looks and works fine. And she will buy
the soap.

You don't sell soap if the page doesn't work. And many don't, and this
one was lucky, because that MS funky code to "protect" (a Publisher
method I believe) and position images usually makes the site MS-only.

A "good" website is one that helps your business regardless of how it
was built or who built it.

 

[Andy Dingley]

To the casual surfer (read that as almost everyone
but a professional web designer) that website looks and works
perfectly fine.

This casual surfer went to their site with his default FF settings and
saw this:
<http://codesmiths.com/dingbat/lj/20070611/sagewreath.jpg>

Not unusual for web code that's been shat out of the back of M$ Word.

"Damn this company has shitty HTML code! SON OF A BITCH! They used
WORD and not Notepad!!! I am going to their competitor!!!!"

Maybe not. But "This looks like garbage" will probably do it. You
don't need to go as far as "why".

A "good" website is one that helps your business regardless of how it
was built or who built it.

Ones that look like garbage anywhere outside of M$ Office won't help.

 

[Bergamot]

<!--[if gte vml 1]><v:rect id="_x0000_s1173"
...

that mega-bloat of the code where the mere markup excluding images can
be unbelievable!

Don't forget what such mega-bloat can do to search engines, too. I've
cleaned up enough MS Publisher and Word-generated sites to know that
SE's get as lost in this cruft as we do.

 

[Beauregard T. Shagnasty]

And how about my friend's infamous site, a true MS Publisher marvel!
Thankfully it is not longer up, www.redskyibizans.com. To any anyone
without IE you got a blank grey page!

Oh, that's too bad. One less example to show how not to build a web
site... <sigh>

I'm sure that the fact it is now missing had nothing to do with the
attitude of the site's designer, though.

 

[Travis Newbury]

This casual surfer went to their site with his default FF settings and
saw this:
<http://codesmiths.com/dingbat/lj/20070611/sagewreath.jpg>

Key words being "his default settings" the page looks fine with FF's
default settings, and IE's default settings, which people are more
likely to use, as they haven't a clue how to change them. (More for IE
than FF as you need some intelligence to know you need to move away
from IE in the first place)

 

[Travis Newbury]

Ones that look like garbage anywhere outside of M$ Office won't help.

If it won't help then it wouldn't be classified as "good"

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Oh, that's too bad. One less example to show how not to build a web
site... <sigh>

I'm sure that the fact it is now missing had nothing to do with the
attitude of the site's designer, though.

"What! @#^%#&* you, works for me!" is not the best design criteria?

 

[Jonathan N. Little]

Key words being "his default settings" the page looks fine with FF's
default settings, and IE's default settings, which people are more
likely to use, as they haven't a clue how to change them. (More for IE
than FF as you need some intelligence to know you need to move away
from IE in the first place)

Well that is the point isn't it? Those who "have a clue" most probably
aren't using MSIE, so they would be taking advantage of "advance"
features such as adjusting one the fly the micro-font sites to a more
legible size. The improving stats on my sites give me hope that we all
are not dim as sheep.

 

[Scott Bryce]

Key words being "his default settings" the page looks fine with FF's
default settings, and IE's default settings, which people are more
likely to use, as they haven't a clue how to change them.

There is something about reaching your late 40's that gives you a new
appreciation for this kind of thing. I find myself reading the web with
fonts at 120% more and more lately. People who need to increase font
sizes will figure out how to do it.

The site in question breaks at 120%. You can do that on your own site if
you want to. But don't sell your design services to others if you create
sites that don't work for those of us who wear reading glasses.