the3rdrock.com

It’s not hard to put up a page on the ‘net these days. A mul­ti­tude of ser­vices cater for the needs of the masses, from ama­teur up to…well, slightly less amateur.

The prob­lem is that most of those on the top perch think a web page is a web page is a web page.

How­ever, your savvy cus­tom­ers don’t.

If your web­site is built with code resem­bling that of your daily deposit, it’s not work­ing correctly.

If your web­site looks good, but isn’t com­pli­ant, doesn’t degrade grace­fully and takes half a minute to load on a T1 con­nec­tion, it’s no good.

I’ve covered this before, so you may recall me telling you that the crux of the mat­ter is the con­tent. If everything else fails but I can still see what I need, you can con­sider that a suc­cess­ful visit to a good web­site. Ironic, eh?

Here are my three latest web faux pas for your view­ing displeasure…

NB! All of these sites were loaded with script­ing disabled.

NB! I am com­ment­ing solely on the user inter­ac­tion aspect, i.e. load times, style, vis­ible errors, etc..

NB! All ana­lyses were done on the pages linked below and only on those pages. They were my entry point into the respect­ive websites.

1. Aim Elec­tron­ics

• The page title is irrel­ev­ant and a wasted user & SEO opportunity.
• The gram­mar is atrocious.
• The look — when com­pared to image of the company’s pre­sumed offices — is dis­tinctly amateurish.
• There is an excess of seem­ingly irrel­ev­ant col­our, very little of which matches the com­pan­ies col­ours as shown in their logo.
• The Altern­at­ive cap­tion for the image of the build­ing is a rather dis­tress­ing ‘our dream build­ing’. Imme­di­ately that brings mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion to mind and is a turn-off to those seek­ing to do busi­ness with this company.
• The image of the build­ing and the design of the page have not been suf­fi­ciently planned for. The main column on my screen (1280 x 1024) is scrolling hori­zont­ally, which is not a nat­ural motion and is gen­er­ally frowned upon by the greater web design community.
• The ISO 9000 tab appears to be after­thought and is not explained (dir­ectly or via dir­ect link) in any way.
• The web design com­pany is not linked to, which detracts from its credibilty.
• The copy­right is dated for a future year.

2. Body Shape Shifters

This is actu­ally a fairly easy-to-use and attract­ive page, but there is one major prob­lem with it…

• There are gram­mat­ical errors.
• The ad’ on the right is lar­ger than the column it is sup­posed to fit into.
• By far the biggest prob­lem with this site is the size of some of the images. For example, the thumb­nailed pizza image halfway down the page links, seem­ingly point­lessly, to a massive vari­ant of nearly 3.3 Mb in size! The uncom­pressed image size is a whop­ping 2,761 x  2,320 px. Why?

3. Pet Bugs

Where do we start with this anti­quated beauty?

• Again, gram­mat­ical issues.
• The design is circa mid-90s, at least. It’s com­pletely out-of-date and a mov­ing men­ace to the eyes.
• It is very dif­fi­cult to fol­low any of the text when everything else is dis­tract­ing you and there does not appear to be any sort of set lay­out. It is more a case of ‘fill a gap’.
• There are far too many fonts in use. It lacks uni­form­ity and clar­ity in purpose.
• The title is an improve­ment when com­pared to Aim’s site, but is still a missed SEO opportunity.
• Pick a col­our set, any col­our set. Stick with that col­our set!
• The images are blurry.
• There is no easy way to skip back to the top.
• The email ‘area’ is a pool of unne­ces­sary multiplicity.
• There is no ‘How To Order’ link any­where in the vicin­ity of the instruc­tion at the foot of the page.
• The really crit­ical issue, how­ever, is that vis­it­ing this site with your image dis­play dis­abled would mean miss­ing out on a huge chunk of very neces­sary info’. For this reason this, above all else, this site is the worst of the lot. You would not get the required inform­a­tion if everything else failed.

As with everything, it’s best to think why the deal you’re get­ting is such a good deal. Some­times pay­ing more does mean get­ting more.

BERG Cloud has come up with a rather inter­est­ing device, the Little Printer.

It’s a printer, roughly the size of your cof­fee mug!

How­ever, it’s not going to print your fin­an­cial reports, tonight’s din­ner recipe or the home­work you wish your dog would eat.

Con­nect to the Little Printer to the Inter­net, select your social net­work accounts of choice and set when you would like to be updated.

Now you can sit down to your morn­ing cof­fee and read a newspaper-esque tally roll slip update of what it is your social circles have been up to lately.

I’m hav­ing some trouble decid­ing who this might be use­ful for, the can’t-stay-but-am-actually-a-tech’-phobe, the need-a-back-up-of-my-mobile-updates-hipster or the gadget-freak-extraordinaire, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say this is quite likely to become a must-have in the very near future. These oddball gad­gets usu­ally are.

Pre-orders for Little Printer open in 2012.

Visit the offi­cial page at bergcloud.com/littleprinter/

Com­mand prompts and GUI apps for dis­cov­er­ing your IP address are so yesteryear.

This is the new age. Everything is about style, pop cul­ture and judging by the estim­ated more than a third of the Internet’s con­tent, sex — or sexyness.

So how you com­bine all of this into one neat solu­tion? Easy.

No kid­ding! Now you can have a mem­ber of The Vil­lage People erot­ic­ally groan out your IP address.

I should point out that the default volume is >loud<, that this is def­in­itely not the best site to be vis­it­ing at the office with your speak­ers on full and that if you are even slightly insec­ure with your sexu­al­ity your colleague’s are going to have a right field day when they spot your reactions.

I happened to open it at lunch­time yes­ter­day and was greeted by a loud (very loud!) groan of the numeral ‘4’. It might not have been so bad had it not been pro­nounced “four…skin”!

Thanks to The Pre­sur­fer for the hearty guffaw.

If you’re a fan of the mis­cel­lany of Inter­net memes out there, you’ll no doubt have come across the Rage com­ics, a bunch of char­ac­ters cre­ated and used to express the daily exper­i­ences and FAILs we all encounter.

Now you can cre­ate your own too, with Dan’s Awe­some Rage Maker, right here.

Here’s mine for today.

Almost every­one has heard the anec­dote about the frog and the boil­ing water.

Accord­ing to Wikipedia:

The premise is that if a frog is placed in boil­ing water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will not per­ceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a meta­phor for the inab­il­ity of people to react to sig­ni­fic­ant changes that occur gradually.

This idea, along with diver­sion­ary tac­tics, is seem­ingly what fuels almost all major soci­etal changes these days.

Major would-be polit­ical scan­dals that might have arisen from dra­matic policy revi­sions are min­im­ised through gradual incre­mental changes. Think of the numer­ous privacy-invading pieces of legis­la­tion imple­men­ted over the last decade.

When the US gov­ern­ment told every­one they would begin ‘fol­low­ing dan­ger­ous people’ with few restric­tions, when they said they’d sub­ject their cit­izens to invas­ive searches and when the cul­ture of neighbourly-spying per­meated the ‘burbs, every­one declared a big Yay!, and then donned their pat­ri­otic badges and applied their flag bumper stick­ers because “ter­ror­ism” was on the hitlist.

When the South African gov­ern­ment told its cit­izens that every­one would need to hand over their inform­a­tion and register their cel­lu­lar SIM cards, to ‘stop crime’, the crowds gathered, after a brief grumble, because it was ‘only’ a slight annoy­ance and we’d be ‘fight­ing crime’!

Those who bothered to read — and argu­ably under­stand the legis­la­tion bet­ter than the assigned spokes­per­son — dis­covered that we were fig­ur­at­ively sign­ing con­sent forms to allow the gov­ern­ment unhindered eaves­drop­ping access to our com­mu­nic­a­tion. We still don’t know who by.

Cul­tural icons and ser­vices are given rad­ical makeovers through small, pre­cise and planned steps. Face­book imme­di­ately springs to mind. As Nich­olas Thompson explains in this art­icle, every time Facebook’s made an inter­face design the hordes have leapt in action across a vari­ety of plat­forms bemoan­ing the fact that their beloved Face­book will now take a few minutes of learn­ing to nav­ig­ate know­ingly once again. Ulti­mately though, every­one will accept it, for­get the old style and move on without fur­ther ado.

Everyone’s missed the ele­phant in the room though, again. Everytime the inter­face has changed, there’ve been far-reaching modi­fic­a­tions under the hood, so to speak. First, games were added. Then, the abil­ity to ‘con­greg­ate’ & organ­ize groups of people arrived. Now, intel­li­gent relationship-based lists and people-recognition algorithms are in place.

Neat-o!, you might think.

If I, as a stranger, approached you on the street and pro­ceeded to delve into your per­sona life, find­ing out who and how you know every­body, where you were last night, what you had for break­fast and then began archiv­ing your com­mu­nic­a­tion to your pro­spect­ive boss, Lover-on-the-side and dirty mes­sages to your part­ner, you would freak.

Cas­u­alty would prob­ably be my first port of call, fol­lowed imme­di­ately after­wards by the local lock-up.

Strange then that we are all happy to give all of our pri­vacy in a neat little pack­age to Face­book, eh? I bet you don’t know ‘Facebook’.

A while ago Face­book changed their pro­file set­tings. No longer were you able to write in your interests; now you have to pick them from avail­able fields. That’s not to make your life any easier, it’s so that they know that you and a few thou­sand oth­ers from Inter­netville, aged 25–30, gender female, etc. list Cro­quet as one of their interests.

When Google branched out and offered us all man­ner of ser­vices, from browsers to blog­ging plat­forms, the planet signed up with much glee.

‘Free is good!’, said the masses.

John Doe, liv­ing in Some­whereville, con­sum­ing 3l of X beer daily and driv­ing a Y SUV is worth more to firm A selling those products than Jane Doe, liv­ing in Nowhereville, con­sum­ing 0,5l of house-brand red wine daily and driv­ing a Z scooter. Buy­ing a near-sure ‘cus­tomer’ is cheaper than blast­ing mar­ket­ing to the world and hop­ing Jane sees it.

As an example, every time you log in to a Google ser­vice, they are track­ing your times, usage and chart­ing it against your his­tory. If you’re search­ing their ser­vice whilst logged in, you’re get­ting res­ults uniquely tailored to your profile.

Still not con­vinced? Per­form the same search on your machine and someone else’s, using the same term.

These tac­tics are not isol­ated to these com­pan­ies. Their size makes them good examples however.

We’ve all been bored at some stage. We’ve all been REALLY bored at some stage.

I doubt any of you have ever been bored  enough to sit down and con­clude that what the world needs is a web­site filled with user-submitted videos of them­selves mim­icing modem hand­shakes (the sound your old modem made when dial­ing up to the ISP).

Ser­i­ously?

In true new school fash­ion how­ever, you can now sign up to the Face­book Page* and the Twit­ter feed*.

* Both were defunct at the time of writ­ing this although they are lis­ted on the site.

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Source: Pre­sur­fer