This is about that naughty "underground" web site by our favourite GWBush supporter - madisonmemorial.com. I know a lot of people are opposed to the site - they say it's slander and bad writing and whatnot. I don't think it's all that bad - I thought the article on X's chemistry class was pretty funny, and the Clique thing was alright. (I was dumb enough to send them something I wrote - about opposition to the headgear rule, which is a good example of my crappiest writing). Actually, it seems like a neat idea - free representation of people's wiewpoints (even views you don't happen to agree with! Oh my god!) Unfortunately, even if it did have better writing and, for you anti-free-speechers, not as much "offensive" content, the site would still suck. Why? Because the site is an almost perfect example of everything you shouldn't do on the web - the web design SUCKS!
Some of you might think, What? I thought it looked real spiffy! But remember - the point isn't to be pretty. Do you go there because of all the pretty graphics and page-layouts? No! You go there to read articles. And the site is not very good at letting you do that.
First of all, the index page. When you first open up their index page, what's the first thing that you see happen? You're browser starts downloading all the fancy banners that link to the feature articles (which, by the way, have been the same for a few months now). You don't get a nice overview of the content of the site - instead, you have to sit there and wait for all the banners to load. And even if you have a super-fast connection, you have to scroll past a lot of junk to get to the rest of the site. Once you get down there, you still don't get a table of contents. You get a few more links to articles, and some graphics over to the side, which are links to other parts of the site (you're not sure exactly where, since the list is not labled "all articles", or "current articles", or anything like that). You then wonder where the table of contents is, and then realize that you have to scroll past the photo of the week first (which is still loading), to get to half of it, while the other half is on some other page somewhere. The layout does not make it obvious where the links take you, and so it is hard to navigate the site.
Overuse of graphics is another BIG problem with this page (as well as the rest of the site). The only thing that needs to be a graphic is the photo of the week, but about half the text on the page is made of graphics! They just show text anyway! Why not just write it onto the page? Now this might not be quite so bad if they provided ALT text for the graphics (you know, the text that shows up while a picture is loading), but no! The webmaster refuses to do it even after I told him it would be painless, and make a better quality page. What if the pictures are loading really slow for you? You have to wait for all the graphics to load before you can tell where a link goes. It's absolutely rediculous what this page looks like in a text browser...
(some funny characters here)
welcome to madisonmemorial.com
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[Artsweek.jpg]
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FIGHT THE POWER: DON'T LET THE COPS HARASS YOU
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The Truth Cannot Be Silenced
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* An open response to Dr. Nash's comments in the school newsletter
* Do Students have a voice at memorial?
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[What_s_new_gif]
(list of about 8 articles)
[Photo_of_the_week.gif]
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Polls
Black & White
Rent a PO Box
Feedback [fastcounter?2348972+4697951]
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[LibraryRobbed.jpg]
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(photo caption)
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and so on... Now tell me that's not ugly! And don't say "use a graphical browser dumbass!" This site was meant to be a source of information to be available for everyone, not just those with the newest browser from micro$loth.
I asked the webmaster to fix these problems (and they are problems, and they could easily be fixed without any damage to the site's looks), but he refuses to listen to my suggestions. He's not interested in making a high-quality webite which is easy to navigate and find information on - all he cares is that it's pretty. It seems to me that this site is more an advertisement for itself than it is a place to get information.
How to improve it? Well, first of all, BURN ALL THE SILLY GRAPHICS! They're just text anyway, they take time to load, and you can't tell what they are without actually loading and viewing the graphics. When you want to describe something in words, write it nice, plain ASCII text. Second, BURN ALL THE SILLY TABLES! (Tables are how they get things to appear next to eachother on the page) Tables make it hard to navigate. Put a header above a section called "Table of Contents" or "Index", which lays out the structure of the site in a bulleted list - this would either be links to different sections, or subheadings for the different sections with a list of articles underneath. Put anything else (like the POTW or the picture of the LMC after being robbed) after the table of contents. After you've done these things, then you can worry about posting articles that are actually worth reading.
So, I say, boycott madisonmemorial.com until they fix they're crappy site!
By the way, this isn't the absolute worst. If you want to see some of the absolute worst things ever done to the web, check out Cisco's netacad cirriculum. Not only is if full of graphics, tables, and frames (which were invented by the devil himself), but you need flash player to simply access the table of contents! It's disgusting! (Want to see it? Go into Networking Concepts next year. ;-) )
- T.O.G. of Spookware