I have no choice but continue my last post ranting mood. Sorry for this, guys, I promise I’ll return to my usual flowery rosy posting attitude.
Uhm, sure.
I stumbled upon Promantra Synergy Solutions new website, today, through the gallery of CSS mania. It’s a beautiful site in general, but I really can’t understand two of the designers’ choices:
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The illustration? Menu? That thing on the first page anyway. It’s supposed to act as a gateway to the most important pages of the site, I guess. It’s made in Flash, featuring some transitions. So far so good, if this thing was only ornamental.
When you hover on one of the links displayed, there is a sliding transition which reveals a tagline and a part of a beautiful illustration. The thing is, the taglines are kinda too abstract and not really related to the initial menu option. So it’d be better if the actual option would still appear after the transition, because I had to go back and forth the menu more than once to understand where I’m going to click right now.
Complicated? Try for yourself and see.
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The thoughtful designer provided users with an easy way to change text size in level-1 content pages, by adding a relevant drop-down list with the available font sizes. Go here and try to change the font size by using this menu… What’s wrong?
Oh yes, the text on the image is not changing. Why? Because the text is part of the image itself. The designers added the text as alternative text, but isn’t it kind of contradicting? Seeing the whole text go bigger, while the image text stays static?
I’m not trying to point fingers here. I’m the last one to point fingers, since my site is not the peak of usability and accessibility. Far from it.
But I hate to see good designs gone bad, somewhere in the road. This site has potential, but it just doesn’t convince me that it’s on the Web 2.0 bandwagon because of two simple things*. Where Web 2.0 means simple, usable designs, focused on users and content alone.
*Well three, if you count the breadcrumbs navigation system which is placed underneath the text passages.
