australian it media: still clueless about standards
Australian IT published this little gem today: Australian IT - Sunbeam polishes its e-image (case study | Sunbeam Australia, JANUARY 31, 2006). It's a bit of advertising dressed up as a "case study". Basically it's a whole lot of fanfare about an average website and the people who built it. For added annoyance factor... "e-image"? Ugh.
Sure, the site looks nice. But it really isn't all that usable, it lacks key information, it's quite slow to load, meets only rudimentary accessibility requirements and it's not standards-compliant. To my mind, there's nothing about this site that sets it apart from any other corporate website.
As a Standards Guy™, it's incredibly irritating to see the site held up as a shining example for all to follow. I'm also wondering how you get your business's name splashed all over the paper for free. Enquiring minds want to know.
As a recent user of the site, I can also say it can be confusing to navigate (tip: the best way to get information on Cafe Series coffee machines is to ignore the "Cafe Series" section) and if you want product support, just ring them. Which is a pity, since one of their stated goals was to reduce phone calls. Considering the operator's icy tone of voice I suspect they get my particular question rather a lot, too.
I keep waiting for the day where I'm no longer peeved by old-school table-based websites being praised, but so far it hasn't happened. It's a pity that Australia's IT media are still unable to do anything other than look at the pretty graphics and read a product's marketing blurb.
I suspect I'll stop being peeved before they stop reading marketing blurbs...
And of course, they don't have their character encoding set up properly either.
What do you mean "for free"? Advertorial is a common practice in journalism. Invite someone to your restaurant, get a review. Sell a lot of advertising, get an article.
Or from the other side. Nothing inspiring happened this week anyway? Write about your mate's last job. Or just recycle a press release. (Once that might have been interesting. But now I subscribe directly to the RSS feed for press releases I am interested in, so don't need to buy a newspaper or read their ads to get the raw source).
Yeah, it is sad that there are junk articles pubished. Maybe if I write better blog entries I will replace the newspaper ;-)
Or maybe not. There's a bit of dross in every good collection...
Chaals - oh i know, but I didn't think it would be nice to say what I was really thinking ;)
I do think it's a pity that such a pedestrian site redev got the coverage (maybe I'm missing something big by not signing up and logging in). But then, I'd have trouble thinking of a corporate site redev which has really impressed me recently.
I know there are two sides to all of these things; I'm sure if I'd become a journo instead of a web developer I'd have ended up with a slow news day... and, well, ultimately I'd have done whatever got the pages filled.
Definitely not something to write home about. I think the site looks kinda crap. Very empty, like the content is falling over the dge of a cliff.