15 July 2008
Story Land and the Local Web
Posted by Todd under: Programming; Web .
EDIT: As an addendum to this post, and as a footnote to this post certain items have been omitted, editing has taken place and this is in no way an apology to what was originally written. people are sore over what was posted and more people will be once word is spread. This is going to be (as the assumption I am under) portrayed as a personal attack on people and former colleagues, which was not the original intent. So take these words as you will, the author knows the true intent and the true meaning behind this post. Feel free to post publicly or privately, and yes, the contact form does work.
To the owners of this “theme park” located shortly up the road from where I live,
Your site is an abomination on the internet. Firstly, I have Flash, I also have the Flash player installed on all my computers. So why is it I am taken to the “no-flash” HTML page? Probably because the back-end looks like the mangled remains of a deer after it has been hit by a logging truck on route 16 in the Notch.
Why you would need a Flash splash page on entrance to an HTML-based site is beyond me. I guess someone wanted to get a little creative and people were thinking with their tingly parts first instead of their heads.
My children love to go there and I bring them every year, so I have nothing against Story Land, nor it’s owners past and present. I just question the methodologies and the judgments of a company that looks to sell, sell, sell and claim they can do anything when in all actuality, they could even blow a fart out of their ass after drinking a gallon bottle of castor oil.
So let’s talk about accessibility and usability…
Now let’s talk about… oh. Accessibility and usability. Right-o. There is none! It failed accessibility testing!!!
That’s the problem with websites in this area, 99% of them are as accessible as Fort Knox. The usability is about nil. I can think of only one thing more usable than these sites. A hand grenade with the pin out. Which is what a lot of these sites look like when the weekend coders and the Front Page users are done with them.
I am on a cable connection. 54 Mbps. I had to wait 2 seconds for images to load! EPIC FAIL!
The entire user experience, as seen by someone with experience is dreadful. A morgue has more life to it. Yes, the colors and the pictures may seem great to a family looking for something to do in the area, but I for one, found the site to be as tactless as the maker of it and the way they did not inform and educate the client on the better ways to design and code a website.
This is why we have people like him, him, her, him, him, him, her, her, her, her and this, this and even this revived site.
No one around here seems to think about anyone with limitations and impairments and it is sad. it is sad that all people around the area who are supposed “professionals” or “professional design firms” see is the almighty dollar.
When you shut out a decent sized part of the populace out, then that can only spread like wildfire. I’d hate to see the traffic numbers and analytic reports, I might cringe or, on the other hand, it may be comedic and I may get a good laugh out of it.
There is so much space, there is so much “blah” or should I say “VOMIT” (one of the colors I believe the company in undeniable question used), it is flat (much like most of their other work, it is depressing, I get no feeling out of going to ANY site they did. I wonder if they had actual graphic designers working on their designs, 300 dpi is not the web, I don’t know if they got the memo and they talk about that in their TPS reports.
I had to wait for nearly three seconds while content loaded on a couple pages and the images used look like something out of a Laurel and Hardy movie.
You lose visitors at 1.6 seconds, it was a lifetime it appeared as far as the numbers go, for the time I spent on this site.
The code looked like something out of a bad B-horror movie, scripts as far as the eye could see, legacy code as old as the commenting by “J. Christ”, CSS so inline, it looked like it had been stitched by Betsy Ross, and naming conventions of which I could not make heads nor tails of what went where and where what was when it was being looked at.
I urge strongly, the entire MWV community and its’ businesses to act quickly to not only clean up their community environmentally-wise, but internet-wise as well. Your sites need a serious amount of work and re-tooling.
More sites that made the unbearable;
- http://www.conwayscenic.com/
- http://www.settlersgreen.com/
- http://www.northconwaylibrary.com/
- http://www.northconwayguide.com/
- http://www.attitash.com/
- http://www.northconwayrealty.com/
- http://www.jtrealty.com/
- http://www.redelephantinn.com/
- http://www.buttonwoodinn.com/
I could go on and on, but won’t, I don’t want to appear as a raving mad lunatic critic (as apparently by the e-mail received lately I am), but the state of the internet locally is abysmal. Those are just a few of the abominations I found and maybe it is not god to critique sites and blast them, but for the sake of the already bogged-down internet, please, for the love of bandwidth and usability, accessibility and validity, clean it up!
I could envision a far better design and a far better user experience for the Story Land site myself, it is a shame that much web space is being used for that mess.
That is all.
