It may seem like all I do is sit around and bitch about how bad a lot of other websites are but if they weren’t so badly set up and maintained I wouldn’t be bitching. Just now I followed a link from within LeNell’s newsletter (a Wine and Spirit Boutique in Redhook Brooklyn) to Artisanal Cheeses (No Doctype) to Picholine. I wasn’t surfing for the purposes of finding flaws, I was just a regular site visitor for once in my life, looking to find something interesting on subjects I find interesting:cheese and booze.I had no problem with either site’s design.I found both to be engaging and attractive. But I sure do hate it when I click on what is obviously supposed to be a link but doesn’t work. Like Picholine’s restaurant menu. It was Flash but the links to parts of the menu didn’t work in Firefox –which amazes me–even if it isn’t as used as Internet Explorer it is used by almost half of your site visitors–and if you checked traffic stats you’d see this is true. Too big a number not to care if visitors using that browser can use your website!
So I switched to IE7 and clicked the link which again did nothing but opening the page in another window led me to a blank.pdf file. Why a pdf and why blank? And why not warn someone that it is a link to a pdf,first?
The short answer is laziness. It’s easier for some designers to load a .pdf than to make another page. It’s easier to design a .pdf than to design menu in a web page–a challenging task…
But what else is a restaurant web site supposed to show site visitors? This is something I see a lot: a designer choosing flash over substance and ending up delivering nothing. The site may as well have been a parked domain notice for all it’s prettiness.
When I see a site that doesn’t work it makes me think the site owners are careless and lazy. And I don’t want to eat food cooked by careless and lazy people.