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.

Yes Weon, I saw you smugly waving from the warmth of your car. I bet you didn’t have as much fun as I did though, did you?

You see, for the second day in succession, I waited until the rain stopped before setting off on the ‘dale. For the second day in succession it starting tipping down within five minutes of me leaving the house, but I was going by then and there was no way I was turning back.

By the time I got to Daisy Bank car park I was absolutely drenched. I arrived just in time to find Nick unloading his 222 from the hire-car (Oh, sorry, we’ve got no Corsas left -how about we rent you this nice Mondeo for the same money?). We whinged about the weather for a bit before setting off up the hill for a blast down the DH tracks.

The first run down was just plain horrible. It was pouring with rain, the trails were slippy as hell and not a great deal of fun. We contemplated not going up for another one, but seeing as we were already covered in mud…

The second run was absolutely mint. It was pouring with rain, the trails were slippy as hell and we were getting used to the conditions by now. Drift-o-rama. I was riding like a wet flannel (no change there then), so Nick left me for dead on every run – but that didn’t stop me having bucketloads of fun.

We got back to the car park to find Neil Cousins (of TFTuned fame) unloading his spanking new Santa Cruz V10, so we showed him all of the new trails. We went slip-sliding down each of the trails in turn. First up was “Love Child” – wherein I left the bike attached to a tree and slid down the trail on my arse. Secondly we took on “Second Coming” which I got down in one piece, somehow. Finally we rode “La Raclette”. I dropped my chain, which was the perfect excuse for wussing out of doing the stupid log-drop halfway around a 180° corner.

By that point we were all starving and the wind had started howling, so we called it a day. Neil kindly gave me a lift back across town in exchange for the use of our hose-pipe and a cup of tea. Bizarrely, I think we did more riding today in the pouring rain than we would’ve done on a typical summer sunday afternoon.

Oh, one thing. Next time I take the ‘dale out downhilling in conditions like that, can someone remind me to fit some flat pedals (or maybe take the 222 out instead)? The SPDs clogged up almost instantly, which is always rubbbish.

I went over to Weon & Anne’s this morning, where Ben joined us to watch the first F1 Grand Prix of the season. It took me a while to get over the shock of Jim “Count Von Count” Rosenthal being replaced by Steve “My hair is rock solid and shall never ever move” Ryder.

After yesterday’s bonkers but actually quite exciting qualifying sessions, I had high hopes for Jenson Button and Felipe Massa (who seemingly came out of nowhere to take second on the grid). Alas neither did quite as well as I’d hoped, though they did bring some extra excitement to the race, with Massa spinning out and nearly taking eventual winner Fernando Alonso with him, while Button pulled off a few fantastic overtaking manouvers. Nico Rosberg put in a fantastic debut, once he’d recovered from taking out his team-mate on the first corner, while Kimi Raikkonen stormed through from the back of the grid to finish third!

After the race we switched over to watch Manchester United vs Newcastle United and Anne served up a rather fantastic lunch, closely followed by the ever dependable crumble ‘n custard. Yummytastic.

The afternoon progressed, Man U cruised into a 2-nil lead and I could feel myself sinking deeper and deeper into the armchair. Despite the fact it was blatantly bloody cold outside I got it into my head that going out mountain biking would be a great idea. I got up, announced my intention and then out of nowhere Owen decided he wanted to come too. Rocking! I blasted home, changed into my bike kit, swapped the Cove for the ‘dale and shot back to pick up Owen.

We rode up Leckhampton Hill via a new bridleway we’d somehow never discovered before (it’s the next turning up from Daisy Bank Road). It’s an evil climb, but gets you to the ruins a fair bit quicker. DPA got us a fair bit further up the hill – and I cleared the ludicrously steep climb at the end! Rock on!

It was absolutely baltic up there, so we elected to keep moving up and over the top. After a quick blast across “Any Given Sunday” (which I’d not ridden for months), I took Owen down the ridiculously named “Second Coming” and “La Raclette”. Veryveryveryvery slippery and damn good fun. Finally we descended into the new section where we ran into Alex, Garry and Stubacca who were modifying the trail once more.

After chatting about Stu’s boarding holiday for a while we set off again. I suggested riding back to the top once more, but Owen really wasn’t up for that (and secretly I wasn’t either), so we set off down “The Old Tramway”. I ruled it for the second day in sucession, absolutely flying off the little rooty drops in the top section. We only did about ten miles, but it was fantastic fun – and that’s the important thing. No doubt Owen will put some photos up at some point More from Owen.

I’m slowly but surely pimping up the ‘dale. First to go was the stem: The orginal was long enough to resemble a fishing-rod. A nice little RaceFace Prodigy went on in it’s place as soon as I got the bike home. Then there was the seatpost. The original came loose a few times, so I replaced it with a nice twin-bolt FSA FR-200 from Garry.

The biggest difference though? That’ll be the bars then. The original’s didn’t have enough rise or width for my liking, so I whipped them off and stuck my EA70’s on in their place. It felt a bit odd to begin with – they make for a very sit-up-and-beg riding position, but point it downhill and it’s transformed. It felt uber-confident down through the fast open section by the Devil’s Chimney and I was rolling straight into some steep sections that would have fazed me previously (not all of them though, as you’ll see).

I did about 15 miles or so today – most of which was getting to the trails. It was all good once I got off-road though. Up-and-around Lecky, caught and then comprehensively burnt off the dude on the uber-expensive Ti hardtail who didn’t hold the gate open for me, then stopped, waited and held the next gate for him. I absolutely ruled the fast open rocky section down past the devils chimney (BWAAARRPPP!), then rode like a girl down the steep bit to the ruins that follows it. Rubbish. Porbably a good thing I didn’t rule that bit though, or I would’ve run over the people walking up. Oops.

I ran into Alex and Garry and chatted to them for a while, before riding a new section of trail (round there, then back, then wheeeeeee!!!) and linking it into the bit we built last week. It’s quite nice, but there’s no way in hell I’m attempting that jump – it’s monster!

I finished off with a blast down the old tramway. I always forget just how much speed you can carry down that trail when you get it right – a proper fantastic way to end a ride.

You may remember that a while back Joe Clark unleashed Failed Redesigns and invited the rest of us to do the same. To recap:

A failed redesign is a Web page created from scratch, or substantially updated, during the era of Web standards that nonetheless ignores or misuses those standards. A failed redesign pretends that valid code and accessibility guidelines do not exist; it pretends that the 21st century is frozen in the amber of the year 1999. It indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables for layout in the 21st century, that’s what you are: Incompetent.

Yesterday Hope Technology relaunched. I don’t like to do this, because I really like Hope as a company. They make some fine products and they employ some cool people. At one of the RedBull / Saab races back in the day they sorted out my brakes a treat – for free.

However, their new site (designed by GraffX and based on the ID CMS) is a complete disaster.

Let’s start with the home page: One look at the code reveals that it was sliced and diced in Photoshop and ImageReady, saved as HTML and then left at that. Amateur at best: the code is absolutely foul. There is no alt text on any of the images, rendering the buttons completely useless to screen readers. OK, so there may not be that many blind mountain bikers, but that also renders the page completely useless to search engines. Nice work.

So, being from England, I click the button with the union jack on it. I’m transported to hopegb.com. It hurts my eyes, but that’s entirely subjective and not what I’m here to discuss. I take a quick peek at the source code and… EEEK!

I know I can be a bit of an HTML purist sometimes but that code just makes me want to cry. How, in the year 2006, can someone still be producing that and charging for it? Reams and reams of layout tables, spacer gifs, alt-less images, <p><b><font> in place of proper heading elements, inline styles… I could go on. This is a shameless example of tag-soup straight out of the dark ages. It’s like the semantic web never happened.

Eh? What does it matter what the code looks like?

1. Semantically correct code will be far more accessible to screen-readers. Like I say, there aren’t many blind mountain bikers, but what if a blind mother wants to buy her mountain-biking son a new bit for his bike?
2. Imagine i’ve got bad eyesight, so I need to scale the text-size up. Oooh, look, the whole site breaks! Brilliant!
3. You don’t care about accessibility? Try this one: Semantically correct code has the added bonus of performing dramatically better in search engines. Why? Because a search engine sees your site in exactly the same way as a screen-reader.
4. Remember: Bandwidth costs money. That code is enourmously bloated. Streamlined, semantic code costs me less to download (remember: not everybody has access to broadband) and it costs you less to host.
5. It can also degrade nicely onto devices other than my high-resolution desktop PC: Think smartphones, PDAs, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP and that sort of thing.

Accessibility and search-engine performance clearly weren’t even considered when it came to building this website.

OK, enough about the code.

I want to buy a disc brake for my bike. I know Hope make them, but I don’t really know what sort I want. There’s a list of products over there, but what the hell is the difference between the Mini, M4, Mono6 and Trial? Apparently I need to know what I want before I click on it. Someone hasn’t thought about this from the user’s point of view, have they?

So, I think I want a Mono M4 disc brake. I click the link and again i’m presented with a confusing list of links. If I didn’t know exactly what I was after I would long since have given up and gone home. It’s verging on unusable.

The idea that someone has charged money to produce this shoddy excuse for a website just makes me angry. So then Hope Technology, I hereby brand you a Failed Redesign. Congratulations.

I dragged myself out of bed this morning, late as usual. I heard the pitter-patter of raindrops on the window. Great. Riding to work in the rain is always good for a laugh. In my mad rush I couldn’t find my waterproof over-trousers (in fact I still can’t). No problem, I’ll just bung the crud-guard on the back of the bike. Could I find it? Could I fu… No, I couldn’t.

Man, it was absolutely hammering it down out there. I had a decidedly wet backside by the time I got to work. Oooh, I had such a comfortable day. I recommend that you try it. No, really.

I’d also recommend that you get overtaken by a Smart Fortwo on the way home. Now, that’s got to be one of the narrowest cars on the road, right? So why, when on a near-deserted dual carriageway did they have to pass me with literally a few centimentres to spare?

MOVE OVER THERE YOU SPANNER! YOU’VE GOT A WHOLE OTHER LANE TO PLAY WITH!

You might well have a narrow car, but that’s no excuse for passing me without altering your course even slightly. Ferchrissakes, it’s even a left-hand drive model! Dunderheaded numpty.

I’m quite a fan of Dirt magazine. Back in the day it was great. Sure they made the odd design mistake like printing black text against a muddy trail but you overlooked that (unless you were Rich), because they had the grunge thing down to a tee. You would read it and want to get out on your bike right away.

The design style made it look like it was literally cut and pasted together – it was like reading a fanzine with some money behind it. The articles were compelling but it was the photography that really drove the mag. The absolutely stunning imagery was what set it apart from it’s peers. Reading through old issues of the magazine really brings out the image of the sport back in the day.

All things move on though, and so did Dirt. They wanted to expand their horizons to take in more than just downhill biking – and why not?

Alas they seemed to lose their way a bit for a while. The photos were still present and correct but they were held back by the the layout. If anything they got a bit too sensible, stuck in a wilderness somewhere between their old look and the very clean cut lines of What Mountain Bike. There was plenty of white space and it was all perfectly readable – all traditionally good things (just look at this place) but the grunge that defined them was sidelined.

I think they’re back in the groove now though. They’re still reasonably sensible where they need to be (you no longer get black text on a black background for instance), but the grunge is back in full effect. Each page of a feature article has it’s own layout, something which ought to disrupt the flow, but somehow it doesn’t. Not every one quite hits home but it doesn’t matter – each page is trying to push the boundaries in one way or another, making good use of colour and strong photography to create a fantastic looking magazine. It’s back to being a magazine that inspires you to get out on your bike and attack the trails.

If only they could sort out all of the spelling mistakes. Some people are never happy, are they?

The downhill trails on Leckhampton Hill are ace. Fast, flowy and technical. Alas, there’s a couple of places where they cross footpaths and the local council weren’t particularly happy with at least one of them. A diversion was needed. Today we built one.

Enter the final section of the course as normal (just about all of them end up on the same bit of trail) and instead of blatting down and over a blind footpath crossing into the final jump, you now carve around to the left, down a steep slope into a monster new berm and over a fairly major 20ish-foot jump (avec chicken-run) which takes you back towards the bowl we all used to ride back in the day.

It’s amazing how quickly things get done when there’s a load of people there to do the work. Biggups to Roger, Garry, Olly F, Simon, James, Nick, Anton, Jez, Mike and the lad whose name I’ve since forgotten (sorry) Rich. Good work peeps.