Here is a link to the Pong landing page (you’ll see) and the actual game of Pong.

Here is my (slightly edited) letter.

Why not. I appreciate crits too, hopefully you take mine for whatever they are.

All in the spirit of love, as I saw some of your guys’ work, and love it. (Specifically Crop Hair Boutique from Design Work Life).

In my opinion:

3 column layout on the web is too much. I’ve never seen a 3 column layout that was working as well as it should (Apple Store, Amazon, all of them could be better if they only had 2 columns IMO)..

Two sidebars means there isn’t a good editor to rip out the content you don’t need.

Enter the content mantras: less is more, clutter is the enemy.

If the average user spends seconds on any given page, this is not telling me anything about you in that amount of time. Showcase sexy work that I get at a glance, big type, lots o hierarchy, something cool, more concentrated area of focus.

Beefy margins and the stark nature of the home page create a lot of visual tension, and only one area to focus on (the radio video), which doesn’t have anything to say off the bat.

A lot o fuzzy and pixelated images.

• Every image on the homepage looks fuzzy.
• Grass bg on Our story is pixelated and a little fuzzy, as well as the image on the top
• All logos on Case Studies are fuzzy. These could all be PNG8s, there’s no good reason for these to be fuzzy
• There are probably more but I’ll leave it at that

The Work gallery is nice. Arrows on project page could be more obvious, as well as the buttons in the top right. All of the white space and small buttons make for important elements that I have to look for, instead of them being obvious.

Also, about the Work gallery, the initial page with the thumbnails, I think it needs to be proportionately more image heavy in the view. The text size is fine, but the thumbs should be bigger, and more eye-grabbing.

How to get a job is cool. Feels like it should be a blog though, and not a part of your professional “we want clients” site

Love the Job Openings clip look. Simple, witty and purty.

Under Fun, there’s only one item in that menu, why have a drop down menu for it? Just put Pong in the top menu

A Simple Use Case: The Journey to the Almighty Pong

On the Pong Landing Page

• Love the animation on the page, but it is a little distracting if you actually wanted me to read that text.
• Secondly, I don’t want to read that text. I was promised sweet sweet pong. The four paragraphs of text here is not a well used opportunity for branding, it’s an extra click and will likely never be read.
• “Play now” should be bigger and or more obvious
• The animation should be clickable
• My final point on this page, why does this page exist? Why doesn’t the Pong link in the menu take me directly to Pong?

The actual Pong

• Tooooo small!! Why isn’t it 100% by 100% and keep the scale mode proportional (don’t remember the actual parameter or value)
• ALL of the buttons on the opening Pong page are TERRIBLE. I have to click the stroke of the type that makes up the button. Let me repeat, the stroke of the type is the hit area.
• When I can hover over the play click area and play, I would expect that my mouse would disappear and i’d instantly be controlling the paddle no matter where my mouse was or what the state of the buttons are (nothing, hover, click, release)On second thought, click (anywhere since the mouse is invisible) could be pause.A simple listener and the smallest bit of math can make this happen. If you want it even sexier, the paddle could have a bit of a delay on it, rub on a polynomial equation of funk for this effect.

I feel robbed of the sweet promise of pong.

That’s it.

Again, love your work, hope you don’t think I’m trying to be a dick, congrats on the new site, and the awesome work

- Wes

]]> http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/a-letter-to-a-webmaster/feed/ 0 http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/googlebot-on-alternate-content/ http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/googlebot-on-alternate-content/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:18:48 +0000 Googlebot http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/?p=293 People often say that I’m “the Web’s most famous blind user.” Well, let’s get this straight. I am not blind. Nor do I give a rat’s ass about your content.

My job is to collect content. And I can see. I see in code.

So let’s talk about a common practice with alternate content that irks me to no end. Even though I don’t care about your cat blog, I do read it. And you people do some pretty skeazy stuff. Sometimes it’s ignorant, and sometimes it’s not.

I read in the SEO forums that people puff their chests out proudly when they say that SEO helps with accessibility. But then they’ll go and pull crap like this:

<img src="/images/killer-bats.jpg" alt="Killer bats" />

How is that helping someone who can’t see a killer bat? Great, a picture of bats on the page about bats. Thanks for the information, douche.

What were the killer bats doing? Are they fluffy? How does it relate to the content? What job was the image doing on the page? Those are the questions that you should be answering in the alt attribute. Not, “What is it?” For those of us who can’t see, “what is it?” is about as helpful as your grandmother’s prophylactic stash.

Want proof that this is called good practice? Read Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization by Rand Fishkin. Can you say “over-optimized?” I know what my cohorts do to content like this. We call it No Rank Town. Evidently management isn’t doing this guy so well.

And just because you have an image and the standards require an alt attribute, that doesn’t mean that you need to put something in the alt attribute. Again, how is this helping anyone out?

<img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="spacer" />

C’mon, just do this so I can move along to actual content:

<img src="/images/spacer.gif" alt="" />

All in all, you guys suck at HTML. The next time you proudly call yourselves an “expert in accessibility” just because you know what an alt attribute is, you’ll know deep down how full of it you are. I hope that you whimper just a little bit at the end of your bragging. It may not be noticeable by others, but you’ll be aware, and that’s all that matters.