The Worst Websites

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I sometimes struggle with some of the design aspects of building a website. However, in times of despair, I cheer myself up by looking at examples of the worst web design. It is a comfort to know my efforts are nowhere near as bad!

This badwebs example has been around for a while now, but it still sums up some of the worst annoyances.

The worst website shows how annoying pop-ups can be. It is a bit of a prank and will temporarily disable your browser! (If you really can't bear to click your way through the countless pop ups, you will need to start windows task manager to shut down the browser.) However, the alert bomb will only happen once in 24hrs, so if you revisit the site on the same day - no pop-ups Phew!

I also find Vincent Flanders site a highly entertaining way of learning good design from observing the bad. (So good in fact, I've included a link on my web design resources page.) This Havenworks one from his 2008 selection is just so unbelievably bad!

Paul Gauguin Art

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The artist Paul Gauguin was in the news earlier this month. Apparently it was Gauguin who cut off Van Gogh's ear, or so a recently published book claims.

The book, titled In Van Gogh's Ear: Paul Gauguin and the Pact of Silence, is the product of 10 years of research by German academics Hans Kaufmann and Rita Wildegans.
Source: Gauguin Cut off Van Gogh's Ear - BBC News

What is interesting about this book is that it is based on the original police investigation of the time.

I've always admired the works of Paul Gauguin and built myself a gadget to familiarize/inspire myself with his paintings. The gadget is now published and features more than 200 paintings, to add to Google click here:

Handwritten Notes to Enhance Site

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I have hopefully enhanced my artist site, albeit in a very small way by adding some handwritten notes in graphics form (i.e. these are images of text). I did this in response to a couple of navigational issues I spotted when I witnessed a first time visitor (who is not a big internet user) trying to use my site. One issue was the main navigation wasn't easy to for them to spot, and the other, it wasn't immediately obvious to click on an image to enlarge it. That said, we are talking about someone quickly scanning a web page, but isn't that what we all do most of the time? When I have the time, I shall probably re-design the navigation, but for now I have opted for adding "notes" to highlight navigation, and to draw attention to the phrase "Click here to view image larger". You can check out examples of this on my Portrait Gallery/Art Commissions page

Generally, I would NOT recommend using graphics in place of text because search engines cannot read the text in images. As Google put it:

Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Our crawler doesn't recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.
Source: Google-Friendly sites - Webmasters/Site Owners Help: Things to Avoid

In my case I have used the graphics very sparingly, and not for important written content. If you're interested in hand-written/hand-drawn web design styles, there's a great article on Smashing Magazine: Hand-Drawn Style In Modern Web Design.

Featured Gadget Feature

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I have a new hobby, learning to make iGoogle gadgets. Gadgets are not just for your personalized iGoogle page (you have one if you have a Google Account), they can also be added to websites, Blogger, Myspace and Ning to name a few.

To introduce readers to recent efforts, I have added a link to the top of blog posts. What I really like is that they are quite small coding projects, so satisfying to make. I also thought this might be an "off the wall" way to promote my website/art. For example, I have a link to my website site shown in my iGoogle directory listing (screenshot shown below). I wouldn't have gotten into all this if it weren't for Seoish - so a big thank you there.

Brown Hare Easter Spring Art

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Here's a square format acrylic painting on canvas of a brown hare I currently have on show in the Wayland Spring Art Exhibition

The painting is titled "Brown Hare on Verdé ", verdé being that beautiful greeny colour bronze may turn with age. It's a strange painting really, and I don't know if it works.

The verdé background was the result of experimenting to see if I could re-create verdé on canvas - that in itself worked quite well (so well I am tempted to produce some simple verdé decorative "abstract" canvases). The square format of the canvas encouraged me toward a "graphic design" approach to the work. I am interested in brown hares, not only because it is spring, but also because they have been linked to pagan fertility rites and the rebirth of spring. Old bronze and old rites, strange symbols - the swirly imprints I've applied, all sound like they could be good together. Perhaps the hare is too realistic looking, or the composition is poor, would like to hear what others think.

Link Checking - How to Take the Click Work Out of It

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I recently added fellow artist Vicky Mycock's new website to my Great Artist and Craft Sites page. Now there are quite a few links on that web page, and I wanted to quickly check they were all okay. So, I ran the page through the W3C Link Checker. It's quite simple to do - you just enter the URL (web address) of the page you want checking on the form and press check. After a few seconds of processing, you get the results.

Below you will see a screenshot of some of my results:

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This is not as complicated as it looks. Reading from top to bottom:

• Line 31 - I have purposely excluded this page from search engines using robots.txt, so I will need to check it manually, i.e. by clicking the link itself.
• Line 153 - this result refers to the google analytics code I have on the page, not my code, so no action required.
• Line 87 - this is what a broken link may look like in the results. This website is no longer, so I will remove the link.

The W3c state that:

For reliable link checking results, check HTML validity first. See also CSS validity.

And there you have it. A simple automated way to check your links using a free resource without having to visit each site/web page manually.

Portrait Art

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Here's a preiview of one of the facial portraits you can view on the new portrait art page on MyDepictions website. The portraits featured span across the generations, and are all pastel portraits of people.

Did you know good quality artist's pastels are a fully archival artists medium? The surface or paper used and standard of framing off course matter when it comes to longevity, but it seems a common misconception that oils are "the only archival" medium.