Yet Another Country In Need

I guess if I keep this up, I’m going to be assas­si­nated for sure. A very good friend of mine from high school sent this to me and I must agree, it’s sad. He’s a con­sul­tant (much like me) and he has been doing great things with AJAX (if you don’t do web stuff, just gloss over that). Thanks Mike. If I get assas­si­nated, remem­ber that you’re still the god­fa­ther of my old­est kid.

As it turns out, many coun­tries have non coun­try code domains that are writ­ten in the com­mon lan­guages of the world for PR pur­poses. North Korea (or prop­erly, the Demo­c­ra­tic People’s Repub­lic of Korea) is no excep­tion. They have Eng­lish, Ger­man, Span­ish, even Ice­landic. Given the ten­u­ous rela­tions of North Korea with the US, it’s no won­der they haven’t spent much time mak­ing the Eng­lish lan­guage ver­sion of their web­site look good.

It’s not OK for your site to suck if it’s ‘official’

At first glance, it looks like some­thing that a high school kid would turn in just to get a “C” and be done with his web class (yeah, they teach it in high school now). As my friend pointed out, they can’t even be both­ered to get the aspect ratio of their flag right. I can almost see into the mind of the guy mak­ing the site. I don’t have a good ver­sion of the DPRK flag, so I’ll use this tiny one and stretch the thing out to fill the space, that’ll fool ‘em!

Here we go again with this tables stuff. What’s worse than mak­ing your entire lay­out in tables? Doing it on a black back­ground with stan­dard link col­ors, that’s what. If you click on any links that are in and amongst oth­ers it makes the whole page look like it was on the receiv­ing end of a butt whoop­ing in a domes­tic dis­pute. One giant bruise…

I would love to take the trip adver­tised on the travel page. I know, how­ever, that I’d end up “detained” for say­ing the wrong thing to the wrong per­son, and never see the light of day again. I’ll just stick to the online store they have. I espe­cially love the sou­venirs they offer. I though it’d be stuff like a cof­fee mug with a flag on it or some­thing. In fact, they’re pro­pa­ganda posters which are named, iron­i­cally, propaganda01 — propaganda13. At least they’re open and hon­est about it.

While I’m no expert on Korean War his­tory, the forum is great. They throw around words and phrases like “Intol­er­a­ble US impe­ri­al­ists” and “Invin­ci­ble Supreme Com­man­der Com­rade Kim Il Sung.” That’s just clas­sic. There’s an arti­cle that talks about the fact that any coun­try with a large num­ber of Star­bucks loca­tions is suf­fer­ing a cat­a­strophic fail­ure of finan­cial infra­struc­ture. The impli­ca­tion being that Star­bucks is to blame for the melt­down. I sup­pose that makes as much sense as the Pasta­far­ian chart show­ing that global warm­ing is the fault of the decline in world Pirate pop­u­la­tion, right?

It is funny to note, how­ever, that sev­eral of the inter­na­tion­ally aimed sites are quite well put together. The ones aimed at coun­tries where the US has a good bit of influ­ence leave much to be desired. So, any good Korean speak­ing web design­ers want to lend a hand? I doubt you’ll be taken up on it, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

After all this finan­cial stuff plays out, they may have the last laugh.

Cheers!

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