I spotted Hope Technology’s new website a while back and branded it a failure. Alas that seems to be something that’s spread­ing through­out the UK mountain bike industry.

Mattmagic pointed out that both Mojo and 24Seven have recently launched redesigns. He’s left it to me to point out exactly what’s wrong though. Let’s take them in turn:

24Seven Bikes

• That’s possibly the most point­less splash page in the world, ever. What’s more, it’s completely inaccess­ible. Where a normal link would have worked, they’ve gone with an image map. They’ve used obstruct­ive javas­cript instead of the href attrib­ute. Best of all, they’ve forgot­ten to include any alt text. Search engines? Screen readers? No, I didn’t think so.
• Oh, I see, it’s supposed to open in a perfectly sized popup window isn’t it? It doesn’t though, because I’ve told Firefox to open links in the same window unless I say other­wise. Someone needs to read Veen’s Give Up Control.
• Frames? In this day and age? Are you quite mad?
• Great use of the title element. A nice helping of UNTITLED DOCUMENT across the top of the browser window looks really professional.
• Those are some nice navig­a­tion buttons you have there. I can’t read them though. Is there any chance you might choose a legible font next time?
• Whenever you use a graphic to create a navig­a­tion element, you must supply alt text. It’s not an optional extra.
• Speaking of navig­a­tional elements, using select elements to jump between pages is just plain daft, especially when they cease to work without Javascript.

Oh I give up. I could carry on for hours about this one.

Mojo Suspension Hoodoo

• Oh man, another great splash page. Why do people still bother with these? This one looks great if you’re brows­ing maxim­ised at 1280 x 1024. Anything less and I start to get horizontal scroll­bars. Even better is the fact that there are no obvious navig­a­tional elements. It takes a good few seconds before you realise those three words down on the bottom left are buttons.
• What the hell is an M-CYCLE anyway? Just write motor­cycle and be done with it.
• We’re currently greeted with the message “THE WEBSITE IS CURRENTLY BEING UPDATED (20÷03÷06), SO SOME IMAGES & LINKS MAY NOT WORK. PLEASE BARE WITH US, AS IT WILL BE SORTED OUT VERY SOON, THANK YOU.” Firstly, you might want to spell “bear” correctly. Secondly, why did you launch if the site was going to be full of broken links? That looks profes­sional, doesn’t it?
• Once we get inside we find great use of frames once again. I don’t tend to keep my browser maxim­ised, and I quite often have a sidebar open. Thanks to the brilliant design of this site, half of the navig­a­tion disap­pears off the side of the page. Now, I know I ranted about uneces­sary horizontal scroll­bars up there, but here’s somewhere I actually need one. Unfortunately, one isn’t forth­com­ing. Just fantastic.
• Clearly I’m going to have to shout it this time. ALT TEXT, ALT TEXT, ALT TEXT and not just when you feel like it, either.
• The bottom frame and the flash anima­tion that sits within it: That really is completely point­less guff isn’t it?

Again, I could go on.

In conclu­sion

These sites are both great examples of work by someone who’s got themselves a copy of Dreamweaver but has virtu­ally no idea how to use it, let alone an under­stand­ing of exactly what it does or what it outputs. “As long as it looks OK on my PC that’s good enough”.

As for semantic markup and stand­ards compli­ant code, there’s no point even showing it to the valid­ator. It’s awful. Not quite as bad as Hope’s code, but I suspect that’s simply because Dreamweaver has cleaned up it’s act a bit over the years.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t partic­u­larly enjoy tearing someone else’s work apart like this. I know that these compan­ies produce damn good product and have great customer service. Alas their websites are absolutely awful and someone needs to say something.

So well done. Congratulations on your failed redesigns. Joe Clark would be proud. For your sakes I hope you got them dead cheap.