Ryu2.mind

Too many web designers today get off by parading to the world their skills with the latest and greatest Internet technologies. They stuff their sites full of sounds and video, webspeak, graphics, Flash and other bandwidth-clogging ego-boosters. Meanwhile, most visitors to these sites either fall asleep or leave the site before the action gets going. These designers don't care about pleasing their audience or their clients. They don't care if your modem isn't fast enough to handle their site. All they care about is putting their tools to work and showing off how talented they are.

There's a name for this: Flashturbation

Artsy-fartsy places such as graphics design studios, ad agencies, and indie game developers tend to be the worst offenders. But, I thought that my church, Great Exchange was immune -- until now.

Sadly, some unknown designer from GrX has fallen victim to this. (I asked all the usual suspects and no one seems to know who designed it... scary in and of itself because this means our webserver login/password is floating out there and we on the web team don't know who has it) The information page for our church retreat is just one big freaking Flash movie. There is no text, no HTML, just Flash. Even the basic information (where, when, who, how much, etc) is presented in Flash format.

It's completely inaccessible if you don't have Flash installed, which is more people than you think (eg, people at draconian companies where installing browser plugins are prohibited unless done through the IT department.)

And to make matters worse, they use the refresh META tag with a time set to 0, so that the browser's back button is rendered useless.

Sigh... I thought we at church all knew better than that.

I know it's unedifying to have such thoughts, especially towards a brother or sister in Christ, but still I sorta feel like punching someone for being so utterly ignorant of basic web usability principles. To the anonymous designer, sorry if you happen to read this. =P ;)