jemjabella

Pants: i D A R R Y L' [d0t] NET

I received an e-mail just after New Year, nominating today's Pants Award recipient. I still haven't decided what I'm actually going to do with the Pants series, so I was tempted to just delete the e-mail... and then I opened the website.

i D A R R Y L' [d0t] NET is... startling. I mean, not just the fact the owner obviously thinks he looks cool giving everyone the finger, but it's such a jumble of different styles and colours. The "layout" is actually a huge, slow-loading png and believe it or not, the sidebar/content offset is intentional! (C.R.A.P - the A stands for Alignment for a reason.)

The welcome message proudly states:

I Think You Should Know That My Site Get Over 50-100 Unique Hits Daily

...but I'm not entirely sure why — 50-100 isn't a high number. Kudos and all, but everyone knows that if you're going to brag about something, you should at least make sure it's worth bragging about first. Maybe when there's a few more zeros on that figure I'll be impressed.

The entire site is Typed Like This; I find it tedious to read for more than a few seconds at a time. I lost count of the amount of spelling errors I saw before even leaving the front page... "Resgister", "Alot", "exists" (exits), "Walpapers". Underlined, bold and italic text are all randomly styled and I quickly gave up on finding links by scanning through — I was left having to hover over every piece of coloured and underlined text to double-check.

In the text under the title "WebMaster" I read with interest that the owner's mum is a lawyer and his dad a judge. It begs the question, then, why he feels he can get away with distributing music and videos via his "imusic" subdomain — blatant copyright infringement. For a talented boy (his words) that's a pretty stupid decision.

The "content" is just as bad as the layout. Typical "HTML Help": textareas, deprecated tags and inline styles. Badly edited celebrity photographs for which credit is demanded. The About page is littered in egotistical bullshit — enough to put my tagline to shame — and contadicts other text on the site ("Im Straight And Single" -> "currenlty taken by someone of 2 years")

The coding is littered with font tags, <center> and <u>; header tags are used but for text that couldn't even be remotely classed as a header; 4-5 pointless JavaScript snippets adding to the bulk; constant repeated properties in the CSS (what happened to the cascade part of CSS?); two body tags; and unnecessary absolute positioning.

Darryl: you seem like a sweet boy, but this "gangster"/"cool dude" attitude makes you look like a plonker. You're bragging about content that everyone else has already done better, and a design that really doesn't do your so-called 3 years experience credit. If you're going to offer resources to your visitors, you owe it to them to do it properly. For not even trying, you get the 15th Pants Award:

Stop listening to your kiss-ass commenters and sort your site out.

Dying Girl is Not Dying

I don't know of how many of you will recall this, but when I gave out my last Pants Award, the recipient turned around and told me that I shouldn't have criticised her site because she has terminal cancer. I'm not sure in what way the two are related — cancer doesn't cause you to have a shite website — but the site was shortly deleted nonetheless. She then said (for some kind of dramatic effect I guess) "I just told you I am going to die"...

Fast forward a while, to this month. I'd forgotten all about her. In theory, she should be dead by this point, really. I mean, I didn't believe her for a second and it wouldn't be the first time that someone online had made up bullshit to try and win sympathy, but one likes to err on the side of caution with these things, you know? Terminal cancer is after all is said and done, "terminal". That means they're going to die.

Lo, how surprised was I then, when someone pops a comment on the Pants entry to tell me that Ms. Amarilys is alive and well. In fact, her plurk even shows a consistent timeline of posting, apart from a short break of 4 days for "surgery". Given that I was in hospital for 4 days under minor circumstances, I somehow doubt that her doctors managed to cure terminal cancer and have her out of hospital and ready to post again within that teeny tiny timespan.

Cancer: it's a horrible disease. I'm glad that through so much campaigning and support from charities we have the kind of cure rates that we do. It's not perfect, people are still dying, but I hope that some day this won't be the case. Given that I was there to watch my Nan die of lung cancer when I was just 14... it sickens me that someone could be so screwed up in the head that they feel using terminal cancer is necessary... because they're a little embarrassed about a FICTIONAL fucking award. Get a grip on reality for crying out loud.

Oh, and your website still sucks.

Pants: Digital Sugar Designs

When you tell the world that you have "7 years of experience in the field", it helps if you show that so-called experience off. And no, blurring a few dodgy photographs so that the subject looks like they're being melted under a 500W halogen lamp does not count as experience in the field. Only in your imagination does that even begin to look professional.

When you tell the world that you "can create beautiful CSS for your website and make it look vibrant and professional", I expect the most elegant and wonderfully presented CSS document of all time; tabs or 4-space indentation for preference. I don't expect to discover that you're actually referring to the website as being visually vibrant, because the misuse of 'CSS' makes me very angry.

When you tell the world that you can install Cutenews, because "[it] is a powerful and easy to use news management system" and you don't end that sentence with "that will ultimately result in your website being hacked by a 9 year old script kiddie from Russia" I have to question your competence as a user of the Internet, never mind as someone who claims to have "coded in PHP".

Amarilys, your "design site" is the 14th winner of the highly coveted (hahaha) Pants Award. Do the world a favour and finish your design schooling before you con anyone else out of hard earned cash; distributing Dreamweaver bloat in place of a real website is not the way to do it.

Feel free to direct link :)

Wearing the Pants Well

Tess has done a write-up in the same vein as my Handling the Critics post called Handling the Pants Awards. It's cute, and I literally laughed out loud, but it also makes a few serious points. Of course, the people who should read it probably never will, but that's irrelevant.

Incidentally, I've had a draft sat in my control panel for well over a month in which I discuss ending the Pants Award series. I can't bring myself to publish it though, and every time I think I'm done, I see another site that I think would be perfect for them. I do know that whatever happens, I need to do something to increase the productivity of each award, because what's the point if they don't actually do any good? (And no, comic relief is not the purpose, it's just an added bonus.)

All suggestions welcome, of course.

Pants: Ticking Timebomb

I was hoping that I could start this Pants Award with my very own review from Ticking Timebomb. It's one of those tweeny review sites that pop-up from time to time, but ultimately disappear because the standard of reviewing is piss poor and nobody actually reads them [the reviews]. Unfortunately, she refused to review me so you'll have to make do with my witty commentary on the state of the site alone :(

The site was brought to my attention by Vera, who has recently decided to take over the Jem fanlisting and is therefore automatically a superior human being to everybody. Except me.

I reckon that if you're going to offer reviewing as a service you have to have some sort of talent or knowledge about the area in which you're reviewing. While a person's taste are subjective and everyone is entitled to an opinion, it takes a special something to be able to articulate that into an objective review that will benefit the recipient. Offering reviews about something which you lack any experience in is akin to driving a car without any lessons: a little bit dangerous.

Ashley, the owner of Timebomb reviews is a little bit dangerous. Not in a "I'm going to stab you to death" kind of way, but in a "little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing" kinda way. Oh, and she's got a personal domain with "wind" in the URL (heartlesswind.com) which made the child in me giggle like an idiot.

Anyway, erm.. reviews. Yes. As I'm sure you've all noticed by now there's a bit of an odd design thing going on with Ticking Timebomb. I am not entirely sure what the desired effect was with the layout but it's kinda 1960s grandma wallpaper meets pixelfx. On a bad day. And, for some reason — quite likely because Ashley's screen res is 1280 pixels wide — the whole thing sits to the right when I've got my browser width set to 1024. The centering cheat must have passed this one by...

The content is served through a nasty <iframe>, styled with a line-height equal to that of the text size which gives that illegible "smooshed" text look. I am not sure why that ever became trendy, you'd think even tweens would want other tweens to read their text?

In the latest update we're held to ransom by a pity party, all because the site is not receiving any submissions. This is funny for two reasons: 1) in my reviewing hayday the only thing I could complain about was too many submissions; and 2) she rejected my submission! Apparently it's all Vera's fault, and because I criticised her submit form but we'll get to that shortly.

Much like my my last Pants Award, I almost skipped right over the navigation — despite the fact that it's about 4 inches high — because its not clearly distinguished from the layout. Either I need my eyes testing or this girl needs a lesson on usability. Maybe both?

The inner pages are styled identically to the front — I was hoping for some line-height here — and are littered with errors. Grammar, punctuation and spelling checks only happen to other people.

The Criteria page lists Enter Page as a rateable component of each review... and there was me thinking splash pages had finally gone out of fashion. Under First Impressions we're rated for the first impression a reviewer has of the "enter page" which surely renders the first part redundant? Those "unlucky" enough to have no visitor content lose 15 points which is a tad selfish, but who am I to question the notions of our piczo expert Ashley? The idea of being rated for Spelling and Grammar had me doubled-up with laughter, but no more so than Website Name; I'd love to know how 'jemjabella' would score there! :lol:

The Submit Form (and this is where my dilemma began earlier) has had 4 fields: Name, E-mail Address, What is Your Site Name? and Anything Else? These fields are fair enough for me — I could put in my actual site name and you'd easily be able to find the URL — but if someone's site is called "chocolate bananas" and their URL is "ilikefarting.com" there's no obvious connection. Like the ever-helpful web ninja that I am, I suggested changing this (for the sake of usability if nothing else) when I posted my submission. However, apparently if I really wanted a review I wouldn't have criticised the form:

I'm sorry I do not what to review your site. You are only signing up for a review because of Vera and I do not appreciate that.
Secondly, if you wanted a review you wouldn't be critising the form and kept your mouth shut. So no. Go find someone else to start drama with.

...and thus why I got rejected. Not before the form was changed to "Site URL:", mind.

Incidentally, the form is one of those freebie ones hosted externally, but it relies on some JavaScript. No note of this was made on the form page so NoScript worked its magic and I thought my original submission hadn't gone through so I retried with JS turned on. Unfortunately, this considerate move wasn't appreciated and I got told off :(

Secondly. Theres no need to send the form more than once.
Reading your mess twice, was twice as annoying.

(and reading her second e-mail was in no way annoying?)

The few reviews that are posted on the site by Ashley all have one thing in common: they're all crap. I did like the invention of a new word here though: "so people know how often you are on the site approximently." (emphasis my own). Unfortunately, they're not long enough to give a real critique but I have composed a handy-dandy list:

Why Ashley's Reviews Are Crap

• She recommends coloured scrollbars for those still using IE.
  Reason why this is bad: people shouldn't still be using the devil browser. More realistically (because I can't force everyone off IE) this is a no-no because web pages shouldn't interfere with a person's computer or browser. Oh, and they're invalid, but that's obviously something Ashley doesn't concern herself with.
• She recommends colouring italic, bold and underline tags differently.
  Reason why this is bad: everyone should be avoiding <i>/<b>/<u> anyway. Use CSS for pretty effects and if you actually want to emphasise text, use <strong> or <em>.
• She's 19, and uses "could of"
  Reason why this is bad: could've — the contraction that has led to a generation of muppets into thinking "could of" is OK — is actually short for could have. Ironically this mistake was found next to "A few grammar problems though."
• Inconsistent reviews
  Reason why this is bad: telling one person that a page of links to other pages "needs more information", and then telling someone else that they should split up their pages into lots linked from one page is giving mixed messages to readers. Decide on one approach and stick to it.

There doesn't seem to be anything here to save the day for Ticking Timebomb. The layout is bland and the contrast shockingly bad on the eyes; the reviews are sub-standard, badly composed and lacking substance; the coding of the site — which I didn't even touch upon in detail — demonstrates Ashley's total lack of experience in web design/developing and I am confused as to why the stylesheet has a .html extension.

Ashley: for thinking you have the right to critique someone when your own websites are a state, I award you 0 points! Oh, and a Pants Award:

Feel free to direct link :)