Just had a look at the website of a local (minor) author – it’s one of the ugliest I’ve seen in a long while. It was produced by a supposedly professional design company. Going to their website and looking through their portfolio I found not only dozens of design-failure horrors – piss-poor in terms of visual design, SEO and coding – but also all of them appear to have been produced from the same basic site template. Their own website doesn’t look to bad on the surface, but underneath, it’s using the same template as all the others, with all the same coding errors. No professional web designer would let a site go live without checking the code in various validators – but this lot do it all the time; they even do it with their own site.
Gah. It actually pains me to see poor web design, with crap HTML, inline styling, tables, depreciated tags and all the rest – not to mention horrible visual appearance. Not from an amateur, mind, somebody who has built their own site; mistakes they make can all be forgiven. But again and again, I see people claiming to be web designers taking money off people for bad work and ugly UGLY sites. It makes me angry, but there’s not much I can do about it; there’s no professional body I can complain to. I can certainly rant about it on forums and blogs but that’s about it.
The internet is ugly sometimes, in more ways than one.