Web Page Kung Fu: Self-defense For Web Design Fraud

What makes a quality product? DeMarco was discussing popular programs that were considered a success even though they had bugs. As long as a product delivers useful features, who cares if it crashes once in a while? In DeMarco's view, customers will put up with bugs provided they can get their work done.

Web sites present a peculiar quality control problem. They're not exactly documents and they're not exactly programs. Customers purchasing web sites often don't know what they're looking for, and when they think they do, they don't have an understanding of what makes a web site design "good". One designer can spend months working on and testing the back end of a web site to have the client complain that nothing has been done because nothing is coming up on his web browser. Another designer can create an empty facade, a web site that is cardboard and duct-tape with nothing holding it together--like a shiny new car with no engine under the hood--and the client thinks they got their money's worth.

In 2005, I went for a job interview at a small web company in St. Catharines. They were located in a tiny industrial mall and had almost nothing except a sign on the door. They intended to corner to web design market in the city by churning out quick and dirty web sites. Flourishing a computer running Adobe Dreamweaver, they ran a slideshow of Dreamweaver's built-in templates and sample web sites as a demonstration of what they could do. In fact, that was the extent of their company: they had purchased one program to make canned web sites and were going to hire a fresh grad at $15,000 a year to provide a little low-cost programming support. And they were going to charge customers as if they had a full, qualified web design team. After all, the customers would never know the difference as long as the web site seemed to work on their browsers.

So how does the average consumer protect themselves from web site design fraud?

• Verify Credentials. Personal recommendations don't mean anything if the customer has no way to evaluate the product. Web design and development takes years of study. The web designers should have 3 years computer programming experience and/or graphic arts design. They should be able to use JavaScript or similar tools. They should understand colour and composition.

  Put their understanding to the test. Take a service like http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com and ask them to give their opinions on a bad web site. (One of my former bosses, who knew nothing about web design, complained that the website I built for him didn't look enough like a real web site, FedEx. Much to my relief, FedEx was voted one of the Worst Designed Websites of 2005).

• Check Standards Compliance. Dreamweaver is notorious for producing pretty pages that are full of limitations and errors. Real developers who use tools like Dreamweaver expect to go through the results and repair the bugs. To check to see if they're relying on "crutch tools", the web standards organization W3C has several free services to check the quality workmanship of web pages. Use http://validator.w3.org/ and make sure the web pages comes up clean and approved.

  You can also view the page source to see if the name of a crutch program is listed in a <META> tag at the top of the page.

• Don't Be Fooled by Pretty Pictures. A friend of mine working in television mentioned how clients creating TV commercials spend countless hours tweaking the colours of a commercial, looking at it on high-definition plasma screens, only to see the final product on their home TV and realizing that it doesn't look anything like it did on the equipment in the editing suite.

Everything looks better when it's viewed on the best equipment. When I worked for Mackenzie Financial Corporation, the company rolled out a sober-looking web site for investors. The site looked impressive in the board room and it received approval by the company overseers. The board room, of course, had some of the most expensive computer and networking hardware. View the site from a dial-up modem and a home computer, and the site was so slow as to be practically unusable.

• Test for Quality. A properly-designed web page stretches when the browser window resizes. If the page doesn't adapt to resizing the browser, the page was likely designed by a tool like Dreamweaver. (The reason: Dreamweaver doesn't know how to break up or organize images so they can stretch smoothly so it usually locks a web site to a fixed size.)

  Try the web site on difference web browsers such as Opera or Firefox. A professional web site behave properly on all browsers. If it doesn't, the company may have cut corners on testing.

• Too Many Crutches. Does the web site require Java? Flash? In some cases, this means that the web site designers grabbed free stuff of the Internet and shoved it into the web site stead of designing it themselves. Make sure you're not paying them to "develop" these freebies.

• The Lynx Test. One of my favorite tests. Lynx is a free text-only browser that works in your command window. Install Lynx and try loading a web page by typing "lynx " and the site name. If a site is well-designed and friendly to disabled people, Lynx should load the site (without pictures). The Lynx test is also a good test for people who design sloppy web sites using too many images, or using images for text.

• Spelling. It should be obvious, but copy the text of your web site into a word processor and check the designer's spelling. If they didn't spell-check the site, what other quality control testing did they skip?

• Resize The Text. Most tools insert text in a fixed size. If your web browser's feature to enlarge the text doesn't seem to be working, you've may have been burned.

• Linux Experience. Linux is the backbone of the Internet. If the web designer has no Linux experience or is quick to put down Linux, it may be a sign that they are inexperienced.

• Too Good to Be True Hardware. Be wary if the web designer is also supplying your web server. I knew a web designer who provided great deals on "new" hardware...by buying all the equipment he sold to clients from eBay. If in doubt, buy the equipment yourself to make sure you're getting quality products.

These tips cannot guarantee that you won't be ripped off by a poor quality, canned web site, but they'll give you warning signs and help you ask the right questions.

Talk back on the Linux Cafe.

July 17, 2006 

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