When Web sites go bad

One of the most frustrating aspects of bad Web sites is that the contact links on the site all go to the Web team that screwed things up in the first place. Complaining to a Web team about its Web site is like complaining to the police about police brutality. My friend Dave, like all my analog-design friends, is, well, a bit different. He has an electrical-engineering degree but has spent most of his life as a software consultant. Dave is one of a few programmers I know who can program a Forth kernel for a 16-bit microcontroller. He can also, for that matter, do high-level Web programming in Perl, SQL (Structured Query Language), C, or Visual Basic. He uses a Linux machine to do his Web browsing. He uses the Opera Web browser, working on a Linux box, because it is a cross-platform product. What exasperates Dave is how poorly most Web sites run on his Linux box. Dave is also a security nut. His wife works in the IT (information-technology) department of a major semiconductor company. She even served on the InterNIC (Internet-network-information-center) committee on Web security. Dave doesn’t allow his Opera Web browser to run Java or JavaScript. He also doesn’t allow the Web sites he visits to drop cookies onto his machine. And he doesn’t run Adobe Flash under Linux. All those snazzy Flash-animated sites developed with Microsoft tools for Internet Explorer don’t run well on Dave’s machine.

Dave complains to the Web groups about how unusable their sites are, but they don’t care. Worse yet, Dave’s concerns never reach the company management. The Web team makes sure that it keeps any complaints from the management, and complaints die a nice, quiet death in the Web group’s trash folder. A company that does not let the public complain directly to marketing, public relations, and top management will always have a crappy product. It is no different when the product is the company’s Web site. It is not hard to craft a decent Web site. You can do it even with Microsoft tools, which work only with Microsoft servers and browsers. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and key developer of the Internet, has given his support to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It runs a validator page that makes sure that any Web site does not use Microsoft-exclusive code or bad HTML or XML (Extensible Markup Language, Reference 1). If your company’s Web site runs on that validator, and it results in no errors, it is almost certain that the Web site will work on Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and most cell phones.

Now, I know that EDN drops cookies, but it is mostly so that we can tell whether you are a unique visitor or just refreshing the page. It gives us more accurate click counts. So, I am OK with cookies, but I sure have had my fill of JavaScript and Flash. The pages of NBC Sports and other media giants are so software-intensive, they bring my CAD workstation to its knees.

Web teams should look to the Digi-Key Web site to see something that just plain works. It is simple, some might even call it ugly, but it unfailingly delivers the goods. Web teams should also access their Web pages over a dial-up and a 384-kbps DSL (digital-subscriber-line) modem. When I was at National Semiconductor, the Web team operated in the corporate headquarters and had a separate network that did not use the company’s servers; it was just a DSL link to the outside world. The team staged any changes on hidden servers, tried everything out over the separate network, and put the pages out “live” only when the team members were happy. There would be a lot more good Web sites in the world if the complaint went to the chief executive officer rather than the webmaster.

Contact me at paul.rako@edn.com.