Neither a master, nor a jack
No matter how much I bang on about plain English and stuff, well… it’s as if people don’t understand the words. This week my life has been plagued with people who think that writing web content clearly, and following accessibility criteria, will make their god-awful content boring. It’s enough to drive any right-thinking web editor completely insane.
Are these people so deluded they believe what they say is going to be more interesting because they’ve put it in a text-box and used sage-green hyperlinks? Perhaps, rather than explain, I should just point out how terribly wrong a webpage can actually be. I could show people this fantastic example of what not to do.
Yes, may be the logo would be ‘boring’ without the flames burning down the letters ‘JFDI’. But then again, it wouldn’t be quite so ridiculous either. For those of you who can’t access (or can’t bear to look at) this page, the flames – unlike real flames – are static, absolutely not flickering.
That, and given that you can’t navigate the website by opening different pages in new tabs or windows in either Firefox or Explorer, makes me think that JFDI – despite their decades of experience “in creatively applying technologies to business process automation”, and oodles of qualifications in things like ‘technical due diligence’ – might not know that much about web design or functionality.
Not that I do either – I’m only an editor who works on the web from time to time – so I’m happy to be brought back down to earth about that. May be they’ve chosen a static flamed logo, tiny writing, rubbish navigation etc, for a brilliant reason that’s beyond the likes of me.
And may be they chose two completely different styles of portrait photo to go alongside their ‘biogs’ for a very good reason too – perhaps to show the contrasts in their personalities. I’m sure they know what they’re doing. After all, Jon Silver – who looks like he’s off to play karate – is a:
“trusted advisor to many clients, and carries an enormous Chinese wall around in his head…”
If anyone knows what that means I hope they’ll let me know. In the meantime, back to Jon who is…
“one of those rare characters: jack of many trades, master of a few. In addition to extreme levels of competancy [sic] on the Microsoft technology stack for more than 20 years, Jon maintains many roles: businessman, IT journalist, technologist and photographer.”
Neither a master nor a jack of spelling, but then attention to detail might make his website boring.
