Controversial - Rubbish Web Sites

Keith in large part I agree

But I put it to you, that we go to these sites because we love our craft/hobby. To have some thought put into "designing the experience" when visitors come to a site is akin to the experience we wish to achieve when we build our layouts. A bad site for me is a bad site! If I see/perceive a lack of thoughtfulness toward me in its design I may not come back.

If it is hard to get the information I am seeking, which often it is I may not come back..... same as when I went to a certain hobby store in town .... service was crap and the owner uninterested. Bye bye store

All I am saying is that possibly we don't realise good design when we experience it because it is transparent to our mission ..... I for one don't think good design = pretty pics. Rather it is a fully functional, intuitive and forgiving website that helps me with my goals and gives me a human experience

Cheers

Steve

Mention BB to a Frenchman and you'll quickly learn it's not yet available anywhere in the UK, just a crippled half-way house I complained about two websites recently; Sony, responded in 45 minutes, the new Sage centre in Gateshead, still waiting eight days later. Says it all.

Agreed. In fact I've seen sixth-formers who can do vastly superior websites!

Heljan's old site was good. They are currently redesigning. Or should I say they are having it done by professionals! There's a moral here somewhere...

Hornby's site is pretty good, but the catalogue and general navigation is clumsy.

Bachmann Farish's is utterly bad. Quel suprise!

BH Enterprises has been bad for ages. I offered my services as a web designer to redo it for them but I don't think they feel a website is really that important for a model railway firm.

On a slightly different note, some clubs have great websites; the N Gauge Society, the 2mm Scale Association and Wirral Finescalers spring to mind.

In my opinion, anyway...

"Gregory Procter" wrote

Sorry Greg I wasn't specifically referring to selling sites and have to agree that if I access a site to buy something then I want it to be simple and easy, unlike the bloody trouble I had with McAfee this morning when trying to renew by Firewall subscription.

My own main interest on the net is photographic images, but I don't want to see tiny over-compressed pictures which are so loved by those with dial-up connections. I'd much sooner download a quality 500kb+ image than something a fraction of that size which is totally useless for all purposes.

That's why I pay extra for braodband, and have had done for around two years now. I wouldn't go back to dial-up even if it was free.

John.

OK, I plead guily to being parochial - I'm in the US. And as a retiree, I'm still on dialup :-). But someday ...

I put a thumbnail picture leading to a full screen picture, if you want it.

I'm right at the end of the line - everytime the local farmers use their electric fences my download speeds drop to bytes per minute - broadband would drop to tens of bytes per minute. The extra speed for the extra cost just isn't inviting!

Regards, Greg.P.

... you won't even need that ...

I agree. Living in the colonies (on the West coast which is even more isolated than our good friends in the East), it is very difficult to find simple stuff (plastic windows as an example) in the local model shops. I do use mail order from UK a lot to get the stuff I cant get here and the one thing that does turn my toes up is long lists of items with no pictures to show you what the item looks like. The description does not always tell the whole story so it would be very handy to have a pictorial catalogue/listing (I do purchase the hard-copy catalogues whenever they are available). Even small resolution images being available as a link from the listing would be better than relying on the description alone. Some sites do this and I thank them for it.

Whilst this would be a great idea, I also appreciate it would be a management nightmare to keep photographic records of all items in stock, especially if the inventory is large.

Anyway, something to consider perhaps.

Cheers Mal Oz

Hatton's does pretty well in this respect. Their prices are reasonable and their service is fast, plus they keep their stock lists up to date. Just a satisfied customer, also in the Colonies.

That is not to say that the only image available should be the 500kb+ image, a thumb nail should be used to index and then at least two file size options should be available.

What I find even more annoying is were the alt tag is either miss used, ie, alt="Click Here", or is totally absent - there are still many people who browser with images disabled (or people with sight problems) who use the alt description as part of their understanding of the pages content.

Where alt tags are missing, and the browser is not rendering images (inc. image maps) it's all to frequent to find a site that is nothing but a useless blank page - in effect !....

I thought BT had an obligation to provide line quality adequate for

2400bps ? If your line quality really is worse than this, then the line is broken and they can be required to fix it.

Mark Thornton

It is not likely that this could be enforced in New Zealand from where Greg Procter's original post emanated :-)

Happy new year to all, especially those in the parts of the world who hit it first.

Dave W.

":::Jerry::::" wrote

That just takes up more disc space and potentially more bandwith too, not to mention the additional work for the people running the website(s). Certainly not an option for any of my sites - I'm struggling to find the time to maintain & add to them without additional jobs.

John.

Try using something like JAlbum to create/maintain the photo section of your sites. It takes all the hassle out of creating multiple versions of an image at different sizes. It is also free.

Mark Thornton

"John Turner" wrote

It doesn't have to be hard. You can for instance get large pictures of everything (large jpegs need not be bigger than 100K for most purposes) and then get various software utilities to batch reduce them to a thumbnail size. One click does it all!! The bandwidth shouldn't be a problem since a few gig of web space is enough for tonnes of images.

The main thing is, don't overstretch. A basic but functional web site is better than a large one with all sorts of mistakes and missing pictures etc. Of course, you also need to consider whether it is worth investing in the web site. You could get some school kid to spend a couple of hours a week to update the site for you costing about £20 !!! - if it doesn't bring in any sales, is it worth having anything more than contact details?

Just an idea.

Luke

Do they really do things _that_ differently in New Zealand? In the UK broadband equipment is all powered from the phone line. Obviously if broadband deteriorates as soon as the local farmers switch their electric fences on they must be powering them from the phone line, which sort of seems odd to me.

"Mark Thornton" wrote

Not as quick as copying and pasting standard HTML script.

John.

That seems a tad high for a telephone line, BT's only obligation is to provide a system capable of carrying voice, they (normally [1]) don't have any obligation regarding a data signal.

[1] here I'm talking about normal home / business voice lines, not Telex, ISDN and the such.

"Luke Briner" wrote

Are you trying to suggest that with over 2Gb of images on line that I haven't explored all those options? I already use software for creating thumbnails from my finished images.

I'm not interested in putting small or poor quality images on line. If people want those, they can look elsewhere. 100k generally equates to crap pictures.

John.