Pants: micromart.co.uk

The last time I mentioned Micro Mart on my blog was when I was ranting about their habit of “educating” their readers with a poor standard of coding. My letter, as predicted by the majority of us, was not published or replied to. It did help me get that ‘moment’ off my chest though, heh. Anyway…

In the most recent mag’, a World’s Worst 100 Websites article was published, featuring the first 50 worst websites. I found this particularly amusing as the Micro Mart website is pretty crap — featuring some pretty awful coding and missing required alt attributes (e.g. <img border="0" src="/sites/micro_mart/images/this_weeks_cover.jpg"></img>).

There are browser issues in Firefox and IE..

overlapping text
Overlapping text in Firefox

missing side border
Missing side borders in Internet Explorer

..as well as an absolute crap-load of flashy, annoying adverts down the side which several of the supposedly “worst websites” got criticised for. The layout is quite obviously designed for 800×600 users but offers no resizeable/fluid versions which means everything is crammed into a tiny space leaving over 600 pixels of screen width wasted when I maximise my browser.

The website relies on JavaScript for certain parts to work (the forum link on the side, unless you fancy clicking another link) without actually pointing this out with <noscript>, and the Copyright 2005 notice is set as a blank link (redundancy, yay). The entire site loads tediously slowly even when all of the adverts and images have been cached, and the amount of crud they stick on one page is off-putting.

The “REGISTER” page has several required fields and yet no note is made next to any of them to state this. A few have bolded labels (I say labels, but they’re not — they’re misappropriate table headers) but this doesn’t seem to reflect anything in particular. There is no <form> around the input fields, and any validation of the fields is poorly done — I successfully entered “boobs” as a postcode which is obviously invalid.

So, Micro Mart, because I doubt you’ll list yourself in your worst 100 websites list, you get the pants award:

pants award

Try cleaning up your own website before preaching about other people’s — only *I* am allowed to be a hypocrite, you know.

Edit (24th June): If you want to see the full list of supposedly “Worst Websites”, there’s a blogspot dedicated to it.

29 comments so far

  1. Anne said:
    On 18 Jun at 2:22 pm

    Heh heh. Wow, bad in BOTH browsers? Shameful, shameful. “Do as I say, not as I do,” right? Cute pants.

  2. Jenny said:
    On 18 Jun at 3:42 pm

    Hm, someone should anonymously email them this blog permalink. :o

  3. Julie said:
    On 18 Jun at 6:17 pm

    Is it me or there is some weird markup in there, like this: < tpl:reviewitemminor rsunat="server" reviewid="2301" / > (without the spaces, of course)?

  4. Jem said:
    On 18 Jun at 6:22 pm

    Julie: I’m pretty sure they’re using a Dreamweaver template and that is what that extra coding is.

  5. Vera said:
    On 18 Jun at 6:52 pm

    a closing img tag?? Ok… I had a very poor impression of a british magazine’s website. It’s called Wed Design (can’t remember the url): it had a really well written and helpful article on accessibility and all legal issues concerning it. Yet when I visited their site, not only did they require IE (the article was particularly adamant on crssbrowser compatibility), but they only provided a flash powered layout… Talk about teaching your grandma to suck eggs… Personally, I don’t really know why we even bother. The customers will not care that their site looks bad in other browsers, as long as it looks pretty in the one they use. And we can’t change that… unfortunately.

  6. Shannon said:
    On 18 Jun at 8:10 pm

    Errgh. I’ve thought that the site wasn’t very good when I first visited it. I mean, here in my view, the ‘Home’ link is floating /above/ the ‘Menu’ heading! And what’s with that ‘Lost Password?’ button and not having a right border?! Oh, gosh. I’m off to read the World’s Worst 100 Websites. I wanna see what they think of others.

  7. Stephanie said:
    On 18 Jun at 9:18 pm

    Am I the only one who finds it hideously funny that they ranked the w3c as one of the worst websites?

  8. Chans said:
    On 18 Jun at 9:29 pm

    No Stephanie I find that pretty hilarious too, the only reason I can think of it’s on the list is because the write doesn’t understand the website Which shows of course in his own website. I can understand if you have a website that’s not properly coded for one browser (although it should but I shoulnd’t be talking I know mine isn’t as it should be but working on it ;) ) but BOTH browsers, that’s just bad. They really deserved the pants.

  9. Elea said:
    On 18 Jun at 9:52 pm

    Just out of curiousity, I ran the site through the HTML validator, and it came back with 146 errors, most of which are really basic mistakes. There are also typos and mistakes in their stylesheet. Not to mention that their website is just ugly in general. So all in all, their hypocrite rating is HIGH and they are worthy recipients of your Pants award.

  10. Amelie said:
    On 18 Jun at 10:05 pm

    @Jem: Dreamweaver doesn’t use tbl:blah style coding, its template markup is all done in HTML comments. Something like < !-- InstanceBeginEditable name="Editable Region" -- > Probably a different editor and/or templating script… I think FrontPage might do something like that, I know its latest version is supposed to have all sorts of XML stuff in it.

  11. Jordie said:
    On 19 Jun at 2:29 am

    Would’ve been cool if “boobs” really WAS your postcode, though.

  12. Cheri said:
    On 19 Jun at 4:04 am

    I can’t even believe the writer of that article included the World Wide Web Consortium in the list. How..dumb. Isn’t the whole point of W3.org for the improvement of the Internet, which is a good thing? Wow.

  13. Stephanie said:
    On 19 Jun at 4:28 am

    But Cheri, it wasn’t PRETTY enough to be a good website! And and and.. they were smug. How dare they, all they did was write up all the stuff that allows us to use the web. God, who died and made them the boss of the web? Oh, the irony, how it paaaaiiiins me.

  14. Stephanie said:
    On 19 Jun at 4:29 am

    And damn your cookies for remembering my old name, and not the new one ;P *goes to delete*

  15. Jem said:
    On 19 Jun at 8:09 am

    @Amelie – it’s full of < !-- InstanceBeginEditable which is why I said Dreamweaver :p

  16. Jordie said:
    On 19 Jun at 1:40 pm

    I saw a poster in my IT room that said “90% of pro Web designers use Macromedia Dreamweaver”. Either that’s a really blatant example of false advertising or hand-coders, like yourself, are in the minority. O.o Don’t think so.

  17. Shannon said:
    On 19 Jun at 5:37 pm

    Errgh, when I read that part about the w3c, I raised my eyebrows, and thought that ‘Wow, Micro Mart seems… so smug about this. They seem to think that they rawk just because they included t3h w3c.’ They mention that since the w3c is ‘THE internet group,’ they are automatically rated for smugness and is churly. Churly. Dude. And they go on to say that casual observers wouldn’t get it. Duh. Casual observers /don’t need to read these/. Unless they’re us. Or so. When you didn’t develop things of the web, DID YOU REALLY look for documentation of mark-up and style?!

  18. Vera said:
    On 19 Jun at 7:39 pm

    @Jordie: I’ve read an article about webdesign in Romania (my country), and most of the designers interviewed (who claim to have lots of clients and generally have a good business) claim to make use of either Dreamweaver or Flash. So I guess there might be something in it.

  19. Amber said:
    On 20 Jun at 7:55 am

    ^ @ Vera: Yup laziness ;). I’m kidding. Anyway… stating the w3.org is just plain madness. It reminds me of all the anti validation people that are out there when you only suggest it as a part of reviewing.

  20. Shannon said:
    On 20 Jun at 6:02 pm

    Hmm… The contact page is http://tinyurl.com/mlg7f. But I’m utterly confused on which one would be the best to use to email the permalink of this to. I’m thinking editor, right? Maybe they should clarify a few more things, and get a site map. Unless they already have one, which I haven’t found, yet. Anyone notice that on Mozilla FireFox, their footer also seems to fly up and covers things much higher up than it’s supposed to?

  21. Vera said:
    On 20 Jun at 7:35 pm

    @Amber: actually I believe most computer programmers who choose to do webdesign, DO actually use editors out of lazyness. I mean come on: they are able to program in C and Java, so how hard can it be to learn HTML and CSS.

  22. Mandolin said:
    On 21 Jun at 1:12 am

    Wow, I visited the site and can see the errors, overlapping text and all. It’s very hypocritical of a site to create a list to point out and mock the very things that the website itself is guilty for. I am thoroughly saddened that they chose to include Ninja Burger, however. I don’t see their logic. And just to reassure you, it’s alright to be a standards fanatic… especially when you are in the right.

  23. Jordie said:
    On 21 Jun at 3:26 am

    @Vera: No kidding! I guess “professional” Web designers are getting lazier.

  24. Shannon said:
    On 21 Jun at 4:49 am

    I’ve always thought that most ‘Professional’ Web Designers are people who don’t seem to design much anymore. The sites I’ve seen in the ‘Professional’ business, seem to always have been built by Dreamweaver.

  25. Sami said:
    On 21 Jun at 5:03 am

    Thanks so much for the review! I could just hit myself for saying that I got copyright over my avatars when I chewed someone else out for that in a website review… Hypocracy, its whats for dinner. Thanks again.

  26. Xeronia said:
    On 21 Jun at 7:51 pm

    Wow. I see what you mean about Micromart. I’ve never seen the site before, but their layout is terribly annoying. At least, they can recode it with tables or something and center it so the empty space doesn’t look as big! And all the annoying animated things…eeww….

  27. Carly said:
    On 22 Jun at 12:17 pm

    Yeah, my new housemate makes a lot of money from web design and he doesn’t know any CSS or anything. Though his flash designs are amazing!

  28. Katy said:
    On 24 Jun at 6:39 pm

    hehe, I was scanning that article last night and getting quite confused as to how they were actually judging sites. Some very odd choices in there, given how many myspace sites there are… the runat=”server” stuff is asp or asp.net or something similarly daft…

  29. Simon Brew said:
    On 11 Aug at 11:58 am

    Sorry, only just found this, so thought it best to come along and collect our pants award in person. We very nearly did include our own site in the list, but the point of the list was more a celebration of interestingly flawed sites (with a couple of exceptions) than slagging anything off. Never got the e-mail about the coding problems though, else we would have printed that. Simon