Pretty Dogs, Ugly Website

I have two dogs. Well, my wife has two dogs. They tol­er­ate me, but they are hers, right down to their cold wet noses. We take good care of them, we buy them top notch food, they’re well trained, they get plenty of exer­cise and we even have them pro­fes­sion­ally groomed on a reg­u­lar basis. Who cares and big deal, you groom your dogs,right?

Well, as always, there is a point. In keep­ing with the run­ning theme of this blog, mom and pop’s get lam­basted, this episode is about a dog groom­ing site. The place (as stated in their page copy) is always booked weeks in advance. As a result, they ought not try a “do-it-yourself” web­site. Ya see, in busi­ness, we out­source what we can’t do our­selves. Oth­er­wise, we would have no employ­ees (what’s an employee if not a place to put the stuff you don’t want to do).

The com­pany is called It’s a Pet Thing, and they’re in my home state of Mary­land. More to the point, they’re in my county (right across the Sev­ern River from me, in fact). It’s funny, that close and they never both­ered to call me. Now I’m bitter…

It’s not a design thing

The good: They saw fit to use style sheets instead of tables. Pretty advanced stuff for rook­ies, you might say. They chose col­ors that are com­ple­men­tary, and tar­get audi­ence appro­pri­ate if the audi­ence is teenage girls (or tweens) who babysit and love the Jonas Broth­ers (I guess men and adults don’t groom or feed their dogs). The prob­lem arises with, well, every­thing else.

I could have cropped this thing to take out some white, but that would detract from the fact that it has a LOT of white to the right. The use of absolute posi­tion­ing is what I would term, ill advised, at least in this par­tic­u­lar appli­ca­tion. I looked at it in three dif­fer­ent browsers and in two dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems and the site looks the same across all. Bad. Now that’s consistency.

This thing has an intro page, and, get this, it isn’t flash. Huh? Why bother. Fun­nier still, on the real index page there’s a sim­ple lit­tle flash movie that dis­plays a motion wel­come ban­ner… over and over and over again for as long as you can stom­ach the page.

So, the style sheet lays text over other text with seem­ing pur­pose (though, I’m at a loss as to what that pur­pose is). The pic­tures (which warns the owner of the site, you may not use with­out “my per­mis­sion”) are anchored in place, and the text be damned. The text itself seems to say, “I don’t care if there’s some­thing else here. I want this spot.” It seems like each page uses its own font style. Some are HUGE and oth­ers are, well, we can’t say small, but normal.

The links… What can we say about the links. How about, be con­sis­tent (too bad the con­sis­tency stopped at the aes­thetic appeal or lack thereof). They start out in the white, then drop into the pink or the “purpink — pin­kle” or what­ever that color is (I’m a male het­ero­sex­ual web nerd. There are 16 col­ors and every­thing else is a hex triplet). Oh, but, hey… There are a few links at the bot­tom too. You just can’s see them due to all the text bleed­ing over them (see above para­graph for those of you with ADD).

This site kind of reminds me of what would hap­pen if a pixie fairy with a dog fetish vom­ited. All I can say is, you should have called me. I doubt that they will, espe­cially after read­ing this. Of course, that would require them hav­ing looked at other sites, and based on what I see, I don’t think that’s hap­pened before.

On the first review, I said it would be hard to do worse. I was wrong…

These things keep get­ting longer, so it’s time to wrap up. It’s a Pet Thing, except where it’s a design thing.

Cheers!

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