It’s been an interesting day in the office today. Firstly, I made Diet Girl overjoyed and in some ways, envious as I found her mystery song first thing this morning. Easy really, I just waited for it to come on the telly last night and Googled the programme’s playlist (the fabulous ‘Inbetweeners’ on C4, in case you were interested). Hardly brain surgery! 
Anyway, the discussions between the humans have been making me chuckle today, as The Master is trying to teach Diet Girl about Website Design. Teaching her anything and getting her to retain the information is an impressive feat in itself, as Diet Girl is the kind of person who gets confused by sentences that consist of more than five words.
The interesting part of this process though, is that they’re both direct opposites of each other- whereas The Master surfs technical forums and can explain how the bones behind a website work, Diet Girl is an internet addict and although she can’t explain how anything works, she knows what it should look like. Also, the only forums she seems to read are related to poorly written 80s cartoon fanfics and shoes.
Now, in case you didn’t know, The Master is one of the leading companies offering website design in Bolton, Manchester, and the surrounding areas. He’s been coding, cropping and uploading since before he adopted me, and my earliest memories involve The Mistress trying to position me on a piece of newspaper on the kitchen floor whilst The Master sat at his desk, constructing websites for local businesses.
Now years later, I’m housetrained (seriously, it’s not easy ‘to go’ when you have someone stood in front of you saying ‘good girl!’ every thirty seconds) and he’s got an impressive portfolio of completed projects under his belt.
He’s specialised in affordable web site design services for small businesses, including eCommerce sites, Content Management Systems and custom web site designs; affordable to many, cheap to some, he provides a quality service with a lot of practical knowledge. What I’m trying to say is, he knows his stuff.
Diet Girl, as I said before, isn’t very technically minded but knows how things should look. She did used to have a website of her own she built as a hobby, and she confessed all about it in the office today. It seems she has committed several heinous crimes herself in the world of website design.
This was confirmed to her when The Master pointed out various forum posts on web design sites during lunch. As she ate her salad (Faddy Diet #39743), she paused momentarily to choke and splutter in reaction to the words on the screen.
Her crimes on her original website (which has now been taken down, sadly, otherwise I would’ve posted a link up here so we could all have a giggle at it) are as follows:
- Technicolour ‘True Type’ Fonts;
- Broken Links;
- Scrolling Marquee text;
- Flashing Gif. animations most of which were from free sites and thus everybody but everybody with a bad/cheap/unimaginative website used them;
- Overlapping, drop-down menus;
- No proper page titles- her home page was called ‘New Page Title 1′;
- A design which wasn’t uniformly adopted by every page on the site- the main design was an entirely black page with coloured text, however of the 8 pages- 3 of them were a totally different design;
- Overuse of ClipArt (cringe);
- Unimaginative stock photos;
- Massive images that weren’t resized from her trip around Thailand- that page took years to load apparently;
- And finally the icing on the cake- visitor counters ON EVERY PAGE.
Diet Girl is currently sitting in the corner wearing a dunce hat that The Master usually keeps in the Vizcom office for ocassions such as this. She’s been there for the last two hours, although The Master, in an attempt to make her feel better about the online monstrosity that she’d created, made her a cup a tea.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ He said. ‘There’s still people who come to me and ask for those same kinds of features on a site- it’s not bad- it just means that they know very little about the internet and how website design has moved on since 1999. At least you know to never use those features again,’
This seemed to make her a little better, and as I type, she’s eating a Mars Bar, which to her is a Cure For Everything. So, the moral of the here kids, is if you live near us in Lancashire, Bolton or Manchester, and you want a quality website designing and constructing which is not only aesthetically pleasing, but user and search engine friendly, look know further than The Master. He’ll set you straight.
Until next time……