Webby sites

I have just been browsing the “honorees” at the 2006 Webby Award site. I had to click on five links before I found a site that I thought showed good web design, which considering that the honorees are supposed to be the best 20% of the nominees is rather depressing.

A Journey to a New Land
This site from Simon Fraser University explaining how the first humans arrived in the Americas is not badly designed, but I still don’t think it merits an award. At first site it looks quite nice, with a broad graphic across the top showing a chilly landscape and a couple of haggard Paleo-Americans looking worn out by their journey across the land-bridge from Siberia. It makes you feel grateful for modern transport and skin-care products. On second glance, though, the navigation leaves much to be desired, or rather, there is too much navigation to be desirable. The first band across the top gives you a link to the same page you are already looking at (a common fault which I have committed myself on occasion). Then there is a thin band of links to choose the educational level you want your content in: primary level, elementary level, secondary level, post-secondary level or Francais. Below this, we have the afore-mentioned graphics, with three visual links to Quicktime movies superimposed. Then we have our main text area, with another menu on the left, and a choice of large or normal text on the right. At the bottom of the text, there is a helpful link saying “back to the top”, even though the whole page only extends half way down your screen. Finally, there is the standard band of links for credits. In short, there is more navigation than content, which is probably how our Paleo-Americans felt about Alaska.

Abort73
I’m trying not to be biased against this site on the grounds of its message. It purports to show the true, grisly face of abortion. Fortunately the embedded video took so long to stream that I didn’t see what horrors await women in abortion clinics, but the overall design was enough to give me an idea. Everything about it says “chaos”, and I don’t mean “chaos” as in “pretty fractal patterns”, I mean “chaos” as in “a bloody mess”. The whole page simply screams at you.

ASPCA
Nowehere near as bad as Abort73, but still full of clutter. Like the Simon Fraser site, this is OK, but I wouldn’t nominate it for an award, except possibly the Cute Puppy Graphic Award.

Ambient Interactive
This is the opposite of clutter. I have no idea who Ambient Interactive are, since the only things on the page are a logo saying “Ambient Interactive” and a link to download Macromedia Flash Player. Since I downloaded Flash a couple of weeks ago, I clicked on the logo. This opened a pop-up window (cleverly designed to bypass Firefox’s pop-up blocking) inviting me to download Macromedia Flash Player. And they wonder why 80% of web users dislike Flash.

AARP
This is the closest I’ve seen so far to something that might possibly get nominated for a design award, though I still think that would be generous. There is a similar profusion of links to the ASPCA site, but they manage to arrange them into some kind of order which is almost aesthetically pleasing. I’m still scratching my head about this one, since by rights the site ought to be a mess, but it doesn’t look like a mess, so I suppose they should get some credit for that.

Update

On revisiting the site, I found Sergio Calatroni's A-Temporary, which has to win some kind of award for using totally over-the-top Flash and Javascript and somehow getting away with it. It’s definitely not designed for accessibility, especially the kind of access that involves a 56K modem, but it’s sweeet.

And a footnote ...

None of the above sites passed the W3C’s HTML validation test.

The Advantages of Illness

We are often told by alternative health gurus that illness is a message from our bodies. Usually the message is “Slow down”, though I suppose it could also be “Now might be a good time to write your will,” or for people whose bodies spend too much time in chat rooms, “omgwtf!!!” I’m not sure how true this is in biological terms, but it strikes me as a good attitude to take anyway. (Philosophically-inclined readers may remember Wittgenstein's remarks about bees.)

In this case, I definitely got a “slow down” message. I had a mild fever on Saturday, but since it was gone by Sunday, I thought nothing of it, and foolishly worked until 3 a.m. for the next three nights. My body replied along the lines of “Look, I told you to slow down!” and I woke this morning with a burning sore throat, so groggy that when I tried to call our secretary to say I wouldn’t be coming in to work, I repeatedly dialled my PIN code instead of her extension number.

Paradoxically, listening to my body’s messages has made me more productive. Aside from sleeping, today I have:

• finished a translation of a documentary about Anatolian felt-makers;
• fiddled with the CSS of our department’s website so that it now has separate formatting for print-outs;
• released the latest version of the Perl web-concordancer to my Sourceforge site.

Actually, the last one sounds much more impressive than it is, since all the new code had been written by Gregor Sieber over a year ago—all I had to do was tidy it up the comment lines and HTML a little. Nevertheless, I still feel a sense of achievement, since all three items on this list had been on my to-do list for longer than I can remember. Thank you, body.