Web Woes

Sunday October 22, 2006

Being in charge of quite a large website brings many attendant horrors. One of them is the antics of the vast number of content editors who I have to keep an eye on. I’ve recently been compiling a list of my web woes. Here’s just a few.

Lazy Bullet Lists

I’m always lecturing that bullet lists are very good to use and tell my editors to break up their paragraphs filled with endless lists into readable bullet points. They’re starting to listen, but they’re bulleting in very strange ways. Instead of using the icons on the CMS toolbar, which are exactly the same as for Word, they do a funny:

space space full stop in bold space space space [their text]

So I don’t get lovely unordered lists, but lots of horrible  s and bullet lists that don’t line up properly.

Underlining Links

I say don’t underline links, which includes email addresses, because the CSS will format the link for you. The underline will appear when you hover the cursor over the link. But they still underline the link, and make it bold for good measure.

Leaning on the Spacebar

This is my argument for why some of my editors do not check their content once it’s been published. The page is about ten feet wide, or if they’ve been leaning on enter, you have to scroll down ten feet of whitespace.

Bad Copying

Copying from Word and missing out the beginning or the end of a paragraph.

Obscure Acronyms

Using the most obscure acronyms and abbreviations, that only somebody who has worked for a district council for sixty years would understand, and not explaining what they stand for.

Lazy Writing

Using inc for including all the time. Using eg and NB all over the place.

Overdoing the Contact Details

Putting the same telephone number and email address after every couple of lines.

Trying to Deliberately Wind me up

Block capitals for text, in bold and underlined (although not a link).

Kindness to Bad Websites

Explaining that, after following a link, a user will have to go here, go there, do this, do that on the website that they are going to because the website:
forbids linking to a specific page directly
or is set up in such a way that you can’t easily link to anything other than the home page
or is just an awful website.
‘on’, ‘your’ and ‘bike’ are the three words that always spring to mind.

Mad File Naming

Uploading Word documents to the website with unusual files names, such as:
ADDRESS iS 3, Manor Court, Glastonbury.DOC

Cheating with the Alternative Text

Our CMS forces an editor to include an alternative text with an image, but it’s obvioulsy not intelligent enough to spot ‘lazy alts’. So even though we have web guidelines, I still see ‘image’ or ‘picture’ for alternative text.

And they wonder why I rant sometimes.

at’s wrong with copying and pasting from somewhere else, anyw

yes, there should be some sort of automated tester and & slap delivery mechanism for many of these, including my own personal bugbear of crap alt text. Trying to tell people that they don’t need to put “a picture of…” on everything gets a bit repetitive!

bah, humbug.

JackP    22 October, 01:52 PM   

There’s another one, which is the okay, so you want alt text – then that’s what you’re gonna get:

“picture taken with digital camera and reduced to under 50MB of Mr David Richards of Weston-Super-Mare, aged 67, Wednesday morning, slightly overcast…” etc etc…

Stephen    24 October, 08:51 PM   

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