Sunday, December 18, 2005

Cameron 4 Lib Dems? Ye gods...

By way of Robin at Perfect, I had a look at the LDYS response to Cameron's recruitment site. I despair. Really, I do. Guys? I'm not a techie, I have problems with anything beyond basic html when I've got a reference guide, but that's awful. I could knock up better in about half an hour using M$ Notepad alone.
  • Google has nothing to work with
  • there's no 'alt' text on the image
  • there's no 'title' text on the image
  • there are no meta tags for search engines
  • there's no text for search engines...
Can one of the LibDem readers of this blog go fix it for them? I'll be sat at my desk hitting it repeatedly with my forehead. Good idea, but so badly done they may as well not have bothered.

Update: by way of comments, I'm pointed at LibDems4Cameron.co.uk which is much better, and rather amusing:
Ten reasons to vote for us (because we can count past six)


Update 2: Given the large number of referrals I'm getting from a private LibDem forum, I'm guessing someone has read this. Given that most of the problems have been fixed in a rather inelegant way, I'm guessing someone listened to my request. As pointed out in the comments, it would be much better to reformat the page so it's actually a proper page rather than text in a .jpg, dial-up users (like me) would like it as well. Still, the humour is good if nothing else.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Somebody did.... it's just not the official LDYS response...

www.libdems4cameron.co.uk is the better named and great fun website which is even coded better than the original...

MatGB said...

I thank you; I was going to put an update up late last night when I found the latter, but it was very late and sleep was needed.

The other one is much better, agreed, but this one is just so very very poor. ah well.

Anonymous said...

And what can you expect from someone who makes web pages using MS Word? Note also the cunning 1pt high text under the image. Pure cluelessness.

MatGB said...

Ah, that's new. Looks like someone has responded to the mail I sent them and put the text in for the search engine necessity. Ah well. Still, the other site is pure class, I like that one.

Anonymous said...

But doesn't it rather underscore the incompetent fatuity of the original design: embed some text in an image, then add the text anyway (but unreadably and again incompetently). As opposed to just styling the text to get the effect you wanted at about 10% of the bandwidth and effort.

The other one is funnier, but what's with the microfonts?

MatGB said...

Oh, absolutely, but given that many web 'professionals' do stupid things like design entire sites in Flash, etc and this was knocked up in someone's spare time, I'll simply take the piss a little and move on.

If there's an award for 'worst online stunt', Cameron gets it, if there's a sub category for being technically crap, then this one gets it.