Misplaced Trust and Obnoxious Colors

So…  Our friend from the UK, James, turned us on to this god-awful mon­stros­ity com­plete with motion graph­ics and the worst col­ors ever ever used on a web­site.  The site is called Tried and Trusted, but noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth.  The idea is a sound one, but the design makes me want to pull out all my hair and fire up an old Dead Kennedy’s album.  It kind of reminds me of what a Sid Vis­cous solo album would sound like.

Can you pick any worse colors?

They intend to review local busi­nesses and tell you, the user, which ones can be trusted.  Prob­lem one.  Yel­low is a hor­ri­ble color for trust.  The only thing you can do to make yel­low less trust­wor­thy is add red to it.  Oh..  They did…  So, we have a bright yel­low eye­sore with red accents telling us who we can trust?   Sorry, I’m not buying.

It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of ani­mated GIF images.  One good thing about them is, they sup­port trans­parency.  For god’s sake, use it.  Don’t lay a graphic of a Union Jack heart (beat­ing, no less) over an exist­ing hor­ri­ble home­page ani­ma­tion and leave the frig­gin’ white box around it.  That’s just tacky(er).  Who­ever made that GIF should be shot, or at least slapped around a bit.  You can tell the beat­ing heart is an after­thought, but I hes­i­tate to use the word thought at all.

Well, as luck would have it, the sub-pages are all dif­fer­ent…  Wait…  The sub-pages are dif­fer­ent?  Yeah, they all look like a kinder­garten stu­dent pasted mag­a­zine clip­pings on a piece of ran­dom con­struc­tion paper.  Just boxes of text float­ing on a dif­fer­ent color for each page.  The fun bit is we have a “designed by” ref­er­ence at the bot­tom of the page.  It says AMPSUK.  I believe the ref­er­ence is “Amps UK,” but if you just leave off the AMP, you should get the point.

A few tips…

If you are launch­ing a new (and in this case “brand new”) web ini­tia­tive, it helps to look around at what other “new” sites look like.  It’s safe to assume the peo­ple involved with this one haven’t looked at a web­site since 1998.  If you are dumb enough to bother putting an “Under Con­struc­tion” graphic, why make the site avail­able at all?  Just put up a place holder page with a ref­er­ence to what day the site will be “done” and work in the back-ground.

Thanks James.  Why I’d thank peo­ple for show­ing me things that suck this bad is beyond me, but at least it makes for new con­tent, right?   For a real treat, feel free to check out the Clubs and Asso­ci­a­tions page.  Before you do, make sure you eat a big greasy meal.  Bangers and Mash, maybe…  If you don’t vomit, write in and tell me how you man­aged to keep it down.  If I were the direc­tor of a club or asso­ci­a­tion I would refuse to allow this site to link to my organization.

At least they can spell (and they keep the music to a min­i­mum), and thank god the clock is there to tell me what time it is…

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