Animals, Bad Colors and Broken Links

It seems that when we involve ani­mals in small busi­nesses, bad design rears it’s ugly head. I don’t know what it is about the ani­mal niche, but it’s as if peo­ple in it (and sadly, I’m talk­ing about women here, no mat­ter how polit­i­cally incor­rect it is to say so) think pink is a good idea. The per­son who gave me this link asked that she remain anony­mous because she knows the owner of this busi­ness and doesn’t want any bad blood. OK, no name dropping.

Firstly, Reiki Tails as a con­cept is a bit hard for me to jus­tify, but peo­ple who love their pets will do any­thing for them. They take them to see pet psy­chics, have their paws read (I couldn’t make that up if I wanted to), do natal astro­log­i­cal charts and all man­ner of other, shall we say “alter­na­tive” things with the crit­ters they love. Call me an uncar­ing bas­tard but if my dog is depressed, I let him out to run and all is well. No dog psy­chol­o­gist needed.

Ani­mals, bad col­ors and bro­ken links

What­ever your views on reiki notwith­stand­ing, this site blows. As with the dog groom­ing site ear­lier it seems that the same color scheme is com­ing back to haunt us, pink and blue. Maybe it’s not a true pink, but either way it’s a scheme that appeals to girls in their tweens (10 — 12 year-olds). My 11 year old daugh­ter loves it, but my nine year old son actu­ally used the word “gay” (where does he get stuff like that?). I think the idea when choos­ing the color scheme for your site should be, to whom will this scheme appeal?

Then we get to the style sheet. At least they’re using one. Well, they’re sort of using one. There is a bunch of what looks like style code embed­ded in the page, but they take all that is good and toss it away so that they can use tables to keep the con­tent from over­lap­ping. We can see how well that panned out. Text and image ele­ments are over­lap­ping in a man­ner that pre­vents the mes­sage from mak­ing it to the eyes of the viewer. Sur­prise, surprise.

Who’s to blame for this fiasco? There’s a clue in the source code. Right there at the top, you have the tell­tale “xmlns:o=“urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” line, mean­ing they used a MS prod­uct to gen­er­ate this pile of sh..er.. code. Which MS Office prod­uct is com­pletely irrel­e­vant, but I sus­pect it was pub­lisher (god for­bid it was Word).

Here’s a math prob­lem, and don’t dwell on it for too long. How many drugs would you have to do, and for how long would you have to do them to decide that MS Office is a good web devel­op­ment and design plat­form? Even the MS prod­uct designed for that pur­pose is the butt of many a design joke. As Abra­ham Maslow told us, “If the only tool you have is a ham­mer, you tend to see every prob­lem as a nail.” Maslow missed the Microsoft era. Just keep ham­mer­ing that square peg, and even­tu­ally it’ll fit that round hole. Tip: Not every prod­uct Microsoft makes should be used to make your website.

The site is clearly not done, and none of the links go any­where. While this inspires hope it also begs the ques­tion, why have the links linked in the first place? Oh, and Aro­mather­apy for pets? Come on… Dogs roll in the stinki­est things they can for fun and you want me to buy that scented can­dles and oil are even kind of on a dog’s radar?

Cheers!

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