Bars Need Designers Too

I love music, I’m sure you do as well. I also love to see musicians at a live venue. One of my favorites is a place in Baltimore, MD called the Ram’s Head. They have everything I like, bands, food, their own beer. They also paid a handsome sum to have a professional website developed. Why can’t more bars / music venues do the same?

I understand that sometimes a bar wants to go the “in-house” route for web development and have the second cousin, twice removed of the owner who happens to be a “computer genius” named Jimmy put the site together. The problem arises when Jimmy is a doofus. See, when Jimmy doesn’t know his arse from a hole in the ground when it comes to style (or have any technical know-how whatsoever), Jimmy should not have the option to add “website designer” to his resume.

Please, for the love of god, pay someone…

I know, what you’re thinking (or I’ll pretend to know)… What’s the point? I do have a point, and here it is. A place to which I have never been in Texas has, it would seem, done the above with its website. The name of the establishment is Poor David’s Pub. With a name like that, it would lead one to believe that David can’t afford a semi-decent designer. I beg to differ. David has a really nice neon sign out front, actually two. He also has custom paint and one of those “letter it yourself” signs. Do you know how much those things cost? For a man (and I’m talking about David here) who has the sense to hire a professional sign guy, why the hell didn’t he hire a professional web guy? I could go on, and I will later. Here’s the screenshot…

See, the main problem with this site is that the whole thing is on one page. One long, dark, colorfully fonted page, loaded with font tags and other useless and non-aesthetically pleasing bits. Anchors are cool in a long article or in a scientific web journal, but a music venue / bar? Pages, my man, pages are where it’s at (and while you’re at it, navigation). Most folks pay for at least 100 MB of web space. I figure David (or maybe cousin Jimmy) thinks he might run out if he uses more than one file.

Well, at least he didn’t use Front Page.

Wait, yes he did. Say it with me folks. Front Page: Just because it’s free, is not a reason to use it. You’re better off with notepad, and that’s even if you have the whole thing designed randomly by a chicken, pecking on the keyboard. Try it. Throw some corn on there and she’ll just go to town.

If you have to do it yourself and you don’t want to spend money, there are a host of free development environments. Download.com is your friend. Learn it, know it, live it. If you can’t scrape together the $49.00 to buy CoffeeCup, perhaps you shouldn’t concern yourself with a website just yet…

This page has no (or relatively few) misspellings. That’s good considering it also has every font under the sun (including Comic Sans). But, hey. If we throw in a few animated gif’s that’ll make everything better. Wrong.

Not too much positive to say here, so I think I should shut up.

Cheers, and see you next time.

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