In message , Sacha
writes
On 4/10/07 11:25, in article , "Stewart Robert
Hinsley" wrote:

In message .com,
"Cat(h)" writes
On Oct 3, 10:15 pm, David in Normandy wrote:
In article , Sacha
says...



On 3/10/07 16:44, in article , "Nick
Maclaren" wrote:

In article . com,
"Cat(h)" writes:
|
| I can't get in. I get a blank page with in the corner a barely
| visible "loading..." thingy that keeps ticking away and getting
| nowhere.

I can reach it, but it is total junk. I am not a flasher, and can't
be bothered to reverse engineer misdesigned Web nonsense unless I
have a very good reason to.

I don't think it's junk but I think it needs careful proof-reading by
someone other than its designer. There are spelling and punctuation
mistakes as in 'accidently' instead of 'accidentally' and 'your' when it
should be 'you're'. Small things but not confidence inspiring if
repetitive.

I agree about the spelling. In a former life I received lots of job
applications from people. Some people had several spelling mistakes on
the envelope (before even getting to the CV). For example spelling the
name of the company and town incorrectly. Others had the most appalling,
illegible hand writing on the envelope. In work where accuracy, clarity
and communication (both written and verbal) is important this eliminated
them before even opening the envelope and reading their CV.

Also, a surprisingly high number of people gave out-of-date or badly
spelled email addresses on their CV. On several occasions, people that
were sent interview invitations never received them due to this. The
emails bounced back to me because the email address given in the CV was
not valid.

When needing to filter out lots of applicants for one position, such
carelessness on job applications proved to be one way of eliminating
candidates.

Obviously it depended on the job. A Mike mentioned, a cleaner would not
be eliminated on the basis of their spelling. Though, it could lead to
signs on the toilet doors saying "Bog is art a horder" :-)


And why miss out on such poetry?

But seriously, I think it should be taken as constructive criticism by
the OP, who is after all intending to make a living out of "designing"
things that are useful to people, that the website he/she uses to
advertise her/his wares puts off at least some people, and therefore
potential customers.
I still can't get in, by the way. I suspect my system here is
allergic to it.

Cat(h)


I can't get past the front page either - while there is a way past the
Flash animation this doesn't work for me. I suspect that this is due to
the use of JavaScript in the web page. (Unnecessary use of JavaScript
seems to be a least as common a sin as unnecessary use of Flash.)

Oh dear - time for me to display my absysmal ignorance. I don't know what
Flash is and have only the most tenuous grasp of Java. Can you explain,
please? I can get into the whole of the site, BTW.

Flash is a browser plugin that displays (possibly interactive)
animations (.swf files). It is often misused to display static images.
(If you want to use part of static images as links the appropriate
method is to use the MAP feature of HTML.

I don't know how dangerous Flash is - for all I know it might be
properly sandboxed[1] and robustly designed against buffer overrun
attacks[2] and other exploits[3] - but it seems to be disabled when
other active content is disabled. (In general allowing web sites to
execute arbitrary software on your computer is a bad idea.)

JavaScript is not the same as Java. There is a connection in that
JavaScript supports scripting of Java applets, but the relationship is
much more tenuous that the names suggest.

JavaScript is a client side scripting language. The proper use of
JavaScript is for interactive web sites (to save on bandwidth and server
CPU cycles). (I think that JavaScript can also be used as server side
scripting language, but PHP, PERL, ASP, etc, are more commonly used for
that purpose.)

Both Java Applets and JavaScript are supposed to be properly sandboxed.

[1] sandboxed - confined to using a reduced set of the capabilities of
your computer so that it can do any harm if it is maliciously or
incompetently programmed.

[2] buffer overrun attack - in an insufficiently defensively programmed
piece of software a malicious user can write, say, 110 characters where
only 100 is allowed for. This overwrites other data; depending on what
the data is it can have severe effects.

[3] exploit - a means of defeating the security features of a computer.
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley