I really don't get some designers. Their complete refusal to understand the way the web works makes me wonder if they aren't doing their clients damage by designing for them.
This guy did.
I have spent the last week working on a new clients site that had everything in the world wrong with it. Backstory: The site is this clients main way of attracting, and more importantly keeping business. They have built the tools and such needed to book their clients into the site. This is the way they keep 12 people employed.
Enter "DesignBoy" who informs them that their site (which was working very well, btw) was 'ugly' and needed a facelift to generate more sales. They agreed that more sales would be great. After all "DesignBoy" has won some awards for his design. Impressive.
So DB does his thing. Flash intro page, flash home page, follow through pages are in html (yay) but hidden in framesets (boo). No title tags, no meta tags, no alt tags, no content visible to search engines at all. Forms that don't work. Browser incompatibility (looked great in Firefox, broke like hell in IE, so-so in Safari). Did I mention he put it in frames? High level content pages in frames? In 2006?
They just laid off the 4th person.
In my opinion, "DB" should be held liable for "restriction of trade", incompetence... or just plain arrogant stupidity. Of course "DB" is far too busy to come to them and fix the problems, he now says he just doesn't know why it is not working and will get back to them soon. Uh-huh.
I have rebuilt the site in CSS and html, made some dramatic changes to the naming conventions, images, alt tags and SE visibility. I am hoping with some strong advertising (traditional) and some serious damage control for many of their clients that had moved on because of forms not working, broken links and such, they can hire those 4 people back.
Bad design affected the lives of 4 families. Maybe more.
Sheeeesh.
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