An account of [RV]ForFEAR's encounter with some Malaysian  Internet sites. 

Date : 10 October 2000

This article is not the result of long, arduous in-depth research but neither was it rushed into so I could post it on my homepage  . Incidentally, two instances led me to write this article and some of the things I didn't like about a majority of the sites I visited and one of which,  I, admittedly was part of the guilty party.

At the end of this article are a couple of links to the good and , in my opinion, those "uugh.." .my websites.

Introduction

With the government inspired push to become a more knowledge-based economy, and the increased public interest in cool, money-laden dot com companies , it isn't quite hard to understand why the typical brick-n-mortar company would be interested in expanding on to the Internet. Who wouldn't? With untold riches and opportunities abound in this gold mine of a marketplace, any Jim or Jane in business would want a website of their own regardless if it did anything but duplicate their existing company material ( if there was any of the sort in the first place). In any case, it would make good coffeeshop talk, if anything  and boy, would it have an impression on that calling card.

Some would have gotten it done right the first time, while others may end up having an expensive website that can more or less into the category of amateurish to mediocre. Apparently though, websites that were built , say in 1996, would have looked a little amateurish, maybe a little simple but who can we blame, the Internet was still young, computers slow , tech low , developers tools underdeveloped , and maybe real measures or documentation of a good page hard to come by. Now, 4 years later , computers many times faster , web standards aplenty , tech high, web tools abound , things would be better off.

The Present

Now, we have non-functioning java scripts , pages that ' view best ' only on Netscape OR Internet Explorer (IE), messed-up tables ,  Submit buttons that don't submit or the ever present Error 404 Page Not Found( although nowadays in IE you get a friendlier message telling you a page could not be found and how you can resolve the problem...uhuh..) . 

Not stopping there yet, some sites use super large image maps that take so long to load that you could watch an episode of Mr.Bean back to front : ) , and to help move things along the JPEG images may sometimes be so highly compressed and pixelated that you'd think something was wrong with the computer screen. Sure, GIFs are a great way to go as well , but by golly, but it doesn't help if the site from which the picture file was 'lifted' from doesn't have the same background colour as yours. Come on, let's have some animation to boot... Let's see , we have Java and animated GIFs. The more animation the better! Heck, we could be a budding Hannah-Barbara  in the works. Favourites that come to mind are the rotating 3D 'HOT LINKS' type of animated GIFs and the dreaded 'man at work UNDER CONSTRUCTION' gif. It wasn't so bad if these were used on someone's homepage, but to have these on corporate websites or  (even) on university/college websites that have the intention of recruiting new students and college applicants , things DO look bad.....in my opinion, that is...

Aqua and lime green anyone? 

Of all the colours to choose from in the 216 web safe colour palette, why do people still choose extra bright colours like aqua and lime green as the default colour for table backgrounds and large blocks of text. I would have said something about having it as the page background colour as well , but gone are the days that anyone actually does do it anymore.

Combinations that in my opinion don't quite look that good are, basic yellow on bright blue (of the hyperlink variety) , aqua with any other colour , or bright blue and green combo. There are a couple more but what I'm getting at is, to me, bright colours like of the aqua , lime green , yellow and the blue (of the default hyperlink shade ) should be used sparingly or if better, avoided ( leaving the colour of hyperlinks and page background at the default are most of the time OK). I do note this 'cos I tend to to be able to distinguish a 'dot.my' site by the use of its colours .

Colours are especially important, in my view , 'cos   they go together with the overall impression of a sites design. Bad colour combo - bad page design.

JScript is so cool. Look, I can make popups...

Another common dislike I have, is the incessant need to include some nonsensical Java scripting wizardry that does nothing more than to slow down the loading of an actually decent page. It is simply so common to see an already graphics heavy page take an unbelievably long time to load because the 'radically cool' script is supposed to pop up some submenu or link description of some sort. Worse still, is when the script doesn't load in the end because of a script incompatibility and the page designers absent mindedly , left the whole site's navigation bar in the power of the script. Uh-Oh

I have to note though, that as far as scripts go there is this script that works in the background and which I have noticed is being used in a lot of the big (think professional) websites. These are the ones that detect the browser type whether it be of the IE or Netscape variety so that the right page is delivered to the visitors computer. Hmm... Now who needs that Best Viewed With IE/Netscape button anymore? : )

Who framed 'tis page ?

Frames are terribly popular with 'DOT MY' sites. There are proponents of the frames craze and I don't think it is a bad thing but to me and generally it is accepted that frames be used in specific cases where its use can be justified and not simply for the mere gee-whiz of using it. A lot of the time, I do think it is due to the gee-whiz factor or simply done to wow the party commissioning the website. Now that I've mentioned it, I can assume the reason why some websites utilise memory hogging/fancy JavaScripts or applets on a page simply to justify the cost of being paid to develop a page. Hmm... Back to the issue on frames, though, another reason frames don't quite appeal all the time to me , is that it makes saving pages I want to read offline troublesome. It's not impossible but it is annoying.

Taking an example of a data rich website that does NOT use frames is the Sheffield University website. An added advantage is  there is also an alternative text-only version of the page that really is a boon for visitors with 'lesser text-only browsers'...: ) 

X marks the spot

I don't particularly like ads. But a website that has ads that don't appear ( hence the the white box with an X inside indicating a bad link) doesn't bode well on first impressions of a site. Typically you'll also encounter sites that have pictures that not showing and end up with lots of blank squares where it should have been. Who knows what masterpiece of an artwork (or link) the over ambitious web designers may have caused me to miss?

Conclusion

It really is easy to criticise a badly implemented website. Not giving the impression that all Malaysian sites are suffering from acute design dilemma, we still have some pretty creative web designers out there. As most HTML tutorial pages will tell you, designing for the web is not unlike designing the layout of a page ,say,  for a magazine. At the same time, the web has its limitations and its advantages. It is often sad to see commercially built webs degenerate into a weave of mismatched text , colour and images. Simplicity is the key. We don't need broken links, scripting errors , someone's poor colour sense , fancy pull-down menus , sliding frames , floating menus and finally bright , glowing , moving , rotating , shimmering , graphic effects to add that little sparkle to a already slow, poorly laid out site . (what a l-o-o-o-ng sentence!  ... now that's bad writing : ) )  With better tools it gets even easier to just do it all , JScripting, DHTML and the like, but does it really matter that an interactive, floating , glowin' menu of links actually follows your mouse but the Search option on the same page doesn't work at all?

Aye , I think I've said my piece. Over and out.

The opinions contained herein this article remain expressly the opinion of [RV]ForFEAR himself alone. It is merely his commentary on the state of the unfortunately large majority of poorly implemented commercial websites in his home country.

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