Posted by cwdjrxyz on 06/15/07 16:25

On Jun 15, 9:28 am, "Jonathan N. Little" <lws4...@centralva.net>
wrote:
> Travis Newbury wrote:
> > On Jun 15, 6:33 am, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
> >> 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!!!!"
>
> 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.

Despite some flaws on the site that started this thread, it is far
superior to some sites of large companies that have deep pockets and
can afford to hire very good programmers. My latest find is none other
than the site www.usps.com , none other than the United States Postal
Service site. Two days ago I decided to order some stamps and other
supplies from them for the first time. I was on Firefox. I filled out
the order forms without incident and went to check out. Since this was
my first order, the first part of this was registration. I filled out
requested information on the first page or two there. At the next step
everything blew up, I got a very long error report, and it took me
back to the start of check out. This happened a second time. Then I
used the IE6 browser, and easily completed the order without problems.
I did not bother to look at the code, because the problem was on
secure pages, and likely some of it was server side code.
I can think of no more serious error for a site than to let you spend
a lot of time on an order and then have it blow up near the very end -
better that the site not work at all than have this happen.

[Back to original message]