Lessons in Web Design - www.followthefrog.com

In a recent post, Seth Godin posted a reader submission, 'worst commercial website of all time', and asks his readers for other offenders. I have to admit, the site linked to is a contender for that title. Take a moment to visit www.followthefrog.com.

Pretty bad, isn't it.

What's unfortunate, is, for but a single line of code, this site goes from being your typical commercial website to being 'all time worst'.

The problem is that the site is set to match whatever the width of your monitor may be, but fails to do the same for the height. If you're viewing the site with a screen resolution of 600x400, the site looks fine. I'm sure the owners of the site are confounded with every complaint they recieve.

How many times do you suppose they end up saying, "I'm looking at it right now, and it's fine!"

However view the site on anything higher than the 600x400 resolution and the text becomes too small or stretched to be even remotely legible. Which is sad. Because one or two lines of code - if that - would have been enough to avoid the problem.

Visit www.followthefrog.com/loader.swf and you'll see the site as it was intended to be viewed.

So what's the moral of the story?
I could sum this up as an argument against the use of Flash as your sole design tool for the web.

This could be an object lesson in the importance of double checking your work before going live. For want of a line of code this site would have been acceptable.

But I think this makes a much tastier story if the lesson learned is that we must try to view our business the way our customer sees it, not simply the way we do.