Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

Public redesign in progress. Please pardon the mess.

rantrantrant

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I really, really need to rant. If you don’t give a rodent’s behind about web design, skip to the next post.

For the rest of you…. a certain fellow employee, in a distant but related part of my organization, hired a freelance web designer not long ago to create a new site for his department. Since this department had no webmaster of its own before I was hired, I think his initiative laudable.

However, the same cannot be said of the designer (who shall not be named). This guy:

a) did the entire site in frames, with no content</p> <p>b) did the site in Frontpage</p> <p>c) did most of the navigation and content in images without <span class="caps"><span class="caps">ALT </span></span>text</p> <p>d) &#8230; similarly, paid no attention to other accessibility features required by law</p> <p>e) couldn&#8217;t be bothered to write proper code</p> <p>Check out this shining example, from the main navigation frame:</p> <p>&#8230;</p> <p><body topmargin=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; leftmargin=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot;></p> <p></body></p> <table border=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; cellpadding=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; cellspacing=&amp;quot;0&amp;quot; id=&amp;quot;AutoNumber6&amp;quot;...> <p>&#8230;</p> </table> <p></html></p> <p>There are several things wrong there, not the least of which being that the order of elements is so hosed that some browsers, including Dreamweaver&#8217;s design window, won&#8217;t even display the table.</p> <p><span class="caps"><span class="caps">GAH.</span></span></p> <p>The designer (who shall not be named) had better not set foot within 20 yards of this building, or he shall face the wrath of she who must spend her day fixing his stupid mistakes.</p></p> <!--<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/"> <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://stephanieleary.com/2003/01/rantrantrant/" dc:identifier="http://stephanieleary.com/2003/01/rantrantrant/" dc:title="rantrantrant" trackback:ping="http://stephanieleary.com/2003/01/rantrantrant/trackback/" /> </rdf:RDF>--> </div><footer class="entry-footer"><p class="entry-meta"><span class="entry-categories">Filed Under: <a href="http://stephanieleary.com/category/web-design/" rel="category tag">Web Design</a></span> </p></footer></article><h2 class="screen-reader-text">Reader Interactions</h2></main><aside class="sidebar sidebar-primary widget-area" role="complementary" aria-label="Primary Sidebar" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/WPSideBar" id="genesis-sidebar-primary"></aside></div></div><footer class="site-footer" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/WPFooter"><div class="wrap"><div id="footer-widgets" class="footer-widgets"> <div class="widget-area wrap widget-thirds "><section id="text-20" class="widget widget_text"><div class="widget-wrap"> <div class="textwidget"><p><a href="http://stephanieleary.com/books/content-strategy-for-wordpress"><img class=" wp-image-8049 alignleft" src="http://stephanieleary.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Content-Strategy-for-WordPress-print-240x300.jpg" alt="This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress." style="width: 120px; 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