When I was working on my T-Sunami related thing they brought in a team of ‘UI Experts’ who created some craptastic tabular layout (with no spacing between elements, what is that?). I yelled at them and kick them out, but if I hadn’t been there the client would have gone with it.

I think Sri Lankans have the impression that good design is somehow harder to maintain than bad design, when in fact it is simpler. Rather than letting the tech do the work for theym, they just get a few cyber-coolies with Dreamweaver. They’re using human labor to do work that CSS and a CMS could do much better.

btw, who did the Tafren logo, and where did it come from?

I have no idea. Besides, I didn’t expect anyone to actually find out what the site was :D

Think of the sites that an average internet user visits.. are the majority of them clean or like your example of a monstrosity ? I’d probably say the latter. I’m not saying that makes it better, but “pile of shit” is a pretty subjective opinion.. and different (artistically, aesthetically or otherwise) is another way of saying unusual. Is “unusual” really something that a corporate drone or pencil pusher wants associated with their message on the internet ?

Visit cnn.com, visit dailynews.lk … Are they so different from this site in question ? Umm. Not really. Clean and informational reads like “sparse” to some people. For what it’s worth, these are also the people who probably think that 100 page reports are better than a 5 page dossier which says the same thing.

On a slightly related note, people with long hair and visible tattoos would be looked askance in our (and many other) corporate cultures. Judging a book by it’s cover ? It happens all the time. Other interesting observations I’ve heard people tout about websites: lots of items on the index page has an appearance of busyness (and thus, importance) attached to it.. And no site is “professional” without flash, banners and lots of blinkenlights.

Just let it go man, and be careful the next time you lend out services free of charge.

But then again, that may be just me wanting to be a WaSP.

As a side note, using images for text menus is just unconsciable. On my connection they load slow, and on dial-up it’s like watching paint dry.

box model hacks, anyone ? That’s a IE 5.x workaround, isn’t it ? Coding to standards just became that little bit harder now.

Prabath, to quote your own words from here: Money didn’t change hands, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t a client. If people (ie: clients) don’t want to be cured, grabbing hold of them and forcing web standard medicine down their throat isn’t going to work :)

1. IE 4? Very sorry. Our designs don’t work that way. Clients who can’t live with that are kindly requested to go for someone else.

2. Box model hacks are a necessary evil. We are quite good at CSS hacks, so all version 5 browsers and above are treated kindly.

3. If a client doesn’t want to be cured, it’s his loss. We try to do our best to inform them of the advantages of going for a future-proof website, but if s/he still insists on shit, we don’t serve it.

How you approach web standards is largely a matter of personal preference at the moment. For some, they are yet another method of developing sites. For a few of us, they’re the only way.

Smoke? Nah! How about politicians, elections, sponsors, tenders, commissions? This is Colombo, right??

Hmm… yeah, the all important bribery and corruption part. Makes the blog dirty, doesn’t it?

Bah. I hate stupid clients. I mean, seriously, who the fuck are you hiring and why? Me, ’cause you can’t do it yourselves. Now go away and wait till you can pay me.