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Practice What You Offer

Seeing as I work in local government I get access to the monthly SiteMorse report for what it’s worth. Imagine the pleasure I derived from the advert within from Amatica:

Amatica delivers some of the best performing and most accessible websites; you’ll find our specialist expertise invaluable in helping you improve the quality of your online service delivery…

I just had to go visit the website and read more.

Oh. My. God. The site uses frames! ‘Nuff Said!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Failed Redesigns. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “Practice What You Offer”

  1. Mike Cherim Says:
    December 7th, 2005 at 2:14 pm

    That is such crap. Yesy, I agree, developers need to practice what they preach.

  2. Mark Allen Says:
    December 9th, 2005 at 5:22 pm

    I Couldn’t agree more! :-D

    Unfortunately, it’s the old ‘the mechanic never fixes his own car’ excuse, our website has been ‘under development’ for the best part of the year now; and the current site is about 3 years old. It’s a bit unfair to blame the developers to be honest - the culprit is actually the same as I find in many cases of this type - the marketing department.

    Your comments will be forwarded to them, thank you :)

  3. ThatStandardsGuy Says:
    December 9th, 2005 at 8:12 pm

    Hi Mark,

    Thanks for your comment, that’s a very valid point indeed. Whilst we talk of standards and accessibility - the technical stuff, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there could be a marketing team between the developers and the public. It’s not dissimilar to the battles that are fought over what goes on the home page (and how) during a website’s life *grimaces*.

    I hope this post is of help, putting it in marketing terms it’s a sale lost times the number of other people out there with the same selection criteria.

    Best regards, Karl

  4. Dan Says:
    December 13th, 2005 at 6:28 pm

    Karl, you’re too charitable by half. Mark, that’s about the lamest excuse there is for web development companies having websites that don’t support their marketing claims.

    What you’re basically saying is that it’s okay for marketing to determine how accessible a company’s site should be? Truth is marketing don’t give a fig about the technical quality of your website, so that shoddy mark-up on your site is entirely the fault of the development team.

    Looking forward to seeing the new site though, should be good if you’ve spent a year on it… ;)

  5. ThatStandardsGuy Says:
    December 16th, 2005 at 4:11 pm

    MeasureMap site stats are a wonderful thing - and so is Google.
    It’s probably time for Amatica to worry when a search for “amatica website” sees this article come in at number 4 and plain old “amatica” a bit lower on page 2.

    If you use frames you severely affect your search engine rankings!

  6. Karl Dawson Says:
    January 26th, 2006 at 8:35 pm

    A new look Amatica was launched 21 December 2005, from their news release:

    David Roberts, Amatica’s director for marketing said “Our customer’s projects always take priority over our own internal projects. We’ve been concerned about the old website’s increasing lack of W3C compatibility and decided that it was time to sort it out. People expect us to practise what we preach!”.

    Yes, indeed we do.
    div id="blah" made me grin, the CSS has some errors and the use of accesskeys may be problematic (we tend not to use them now) but it is miles better than the old site. Keep up the good work.