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What Sucks about SonghaySystem.com and kintespace.com

I don’t think my websites will ever reach the home page of http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/ but they are trapped in the wired way of the late 1990s. It takes less energy to make my criticism non-directional—this means my flippant and critical remarks are also directed at myself. Critique is not meant for a life of emotional abuse. You can use a knife to cut someone open in an attempt to save their life—or you can just cut someone open. I do not intend to be a quack so here are the incisions:

  • The home page of kintespace.com is just a giant splash screen with a menu stuck at the bottom. This design violates just about everything in “Top Ten Guidelines for Homepage Usability” by Dr. Jakob Nielsen.
  • The ‘back to home’ buttons at the bottom of the kinté web pages are obsolete. They do not scale well visually on large monitors (with regard to horizontal positioning) and the previously designed concept of “returning to home” is probably dead—now home should mean something other than the root index page of my website.
  • Advertising content breaks XHTML compliance. This is a personal pet peeve—and, in the same manner most feed readers drop invalid feeds, the possible content aggregators/re-formatters of the future may exclude my content for this technical reason (instead of the currently popular political reasons).
  • New content takes too long to appear on the sites. I’ve joined the club and now I want to resign: this has been a serious technical problem that will only become a financial/lifestyle problem.
  • The SonghaySystem.com home page uses a crude form asynchronous loading that is a joke compared to AJAX. It’s funny now because it’s the year 2005.
  • The SonghaySystem.com concept of ‘public tools’ is somewhat redundant. This means that I should get rid of the folder named \public_tools—and clearly distinguish what is a ‘sample’ and what is a production resource. It’s time to edit an .htaccess file.

I know there are more issues but these are what come to mind today. They are in the rasx() context and I post them. I am sure this lack of “giving” “the user” control over the topic of this Blog violates Dr. Nielsen’s “Weblog Usability” rules but I will stay in this very, very large club for the moment.

rasx()