AutoTRAIN

[David]

AutoTRAIN (http://www.atrain.org.uk/)

One of the worst "professional" sites I have come across in some time.

Try using it over dial-up. It was almost a minute before the menu revealed itself. This site is a very good argument for banning the use of Flash by anyone without a licence.

I sometimes use inline frames but what the hell is this all about? Why on earth would you do that?

The menu is appaling, text too small and requires a page refresh to get to sub-menu items.

Try the "contact us" link just for a laugh.

The page is not visually balanced - looks like it's about to slide off my screen.

Am I just being harsh?

:geek:

[James]

No, that's not harsh, it's an awful site!

I happened to click on a link on BBC News yesterday that took me to FOREST's website - the pro-smoking lobby (no, I'm not pro-smoking, I was just surfing).

Watch the status bar bottom left - the page will load and announce "Done" - but wait for it, it hasn't "Done" at all - watch in amazement as 400 spacer gifs load!! Unbelievable, and it's on most of their pages!

http://www.forestonline.org.uk/output/Page2.asp

[francis]

That&#39;s truly awful. I&#39;m still on dialup at home and the menu didn&#39;t take anything like a minute. <sarcasm>Excellent use of Flash on the homepage</sarcasm>*. You have to wonder what on earth possessed them to put that in an iframe - and one that scrolls horizontally on most pages. Still, nice to see some alt text on the nav bar, even if they have used "at_logo" as the alt text for their logo... I wonder what that mysterious white dot is on the nav bar that&#39;s visible when you hover over Drawing Management.

Doesn&#39;t validate (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atrain.org.uk%2Fat_home _menu.htm&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=%28detect+automatically%29&ss=1&verbose=1). 73 errors in about 280 lines of code - good average&#33; It seems to be a mixture of Fireworks MX and DW MX working together - that might explain a lot. Just because DW has the potential to create great sites, doesn&#39;t automatically make everything that comes out of it good.

Luckily they don&#39;t specify what choice they are for professionals and shouldn&#39;t there be an apostrophe in there?). Nothing on that site would want me to work with them - I wouldn&#39;t give them any money based on their shop window.

* What this form needs is strikethrough text formatting - makes for much more fun.

[Tom]

See http://www.skip-intro.com/.

[David]

Originally posted by Tom Turner@Jun 10 2004, 8:32 pm
See http://www.skip-intro.com/.
:D Now there&#39;s a guy with a sense of humour.

Did you try the translation?

[David]

Originally posted by James Barker@Jun 10 2004, 6:35 pm
I happened to click on a link on BBC News yesterday that took me to FOREST&#39;s website - the pro-smoking lobby (no, I&#39;m not pro-smoking, I was just surfing).

Watch the status bar bottom left - the page will load and announce "Done" - but wait for it, it hasn&#39;t "Done" at all - watch in amazement as 400 spacer gifs load&#33;&#33; Unbelievable, and it&#39;s on most of their pages&#33;

http://www.forestonline.org.uk/output/Page2.asp
Wow&#33; That Forest site is something else. I pulled the code into DW in order to try and make some sense from it but failed miserably. What I can tell you is that the home page contains 145 table cells in 32 tables - not bad for a fairly simple page.

There appears to be an amazing amount of surplus code in there and all those spacer GIFs are just 1 pixel wide - weird&#33;