Review New UI

Afternoon DigitalPoint,

We recently just launched PublicityClerks 2.0 (PublicityClerks.com) which includes a full overhaul of our user interface. (We moved over to Bootstrap, and tried to make the UX very easy.)

I would love it if you could browse around, and provide any feedback/suggestions for improvements to the UI/UX.

Let me know,

Sean

 

well, the blue on blue menu and even closer blue on blue in the footer fall short of contrast minimums, the giant space-wasting banner area on the home page just pushes the ACTUAL content off screen at anything smaller than 1920x1080 (WHY do designers do this?!?), the use of illegible fixed metric (aka pixel measurement) fonts is an accessibility mess, as is the lack of meaningful use of numbered headings and absolute gibberish the few headings present are. (How can you have H5 with no H4 or H3 for them to be the start of subsections of?!? Much less an H2 with no H1). Whatever the devil goofy webfont that is has severe legibility issues as well (It's a webfont -- duh) which is why I'd probably axe that for a system font since as always, webfonts should be used with an eyedropper on larger texts like headings, and rarely if ever on normal content 'flow text'.

The ATTEMPT at being responsive is broken rubbish, and... ok, do I smell bootcrap? You might want to find a stick to scrape that off with before you track it all over your website's carpets. It doesn't even come close to gracefully degrading and is a useless disaster on screen readers like JAWS -- most likely stemming from bad site-building methodology.

Seems painful to watch load here given the relative LACK of content -- reason being clear as it's a ridiculous 4.6 megabytes in 30 separate files when you only have 1.33k of plaintext and a dozen content images that shouldn't even be breaking at the WORST optimization half a megabyte...

Peeking under the hood the very first line of markup proudly proclaims much of the site's woes -- Transitional -- which basically means "in transition from 1997 to 1998 development practices" -- tranny is for updating old 1990's websites, not building new ones or new templates. It gets worse from there since half a meg and ten files of that garbage is scripttardery and bloated CSS nonsense; though again much of that bloat can be laid directly on bootcrap's doorstep and is why I say that developers are dumber for bootstrap even EXISTING. It is a laundry list of how NOT to build a website and if you've been duped into thinking that it serves any legitimate purpose or provides any advantages, you don't know enough about HTML or CSS to be building websites yet.

It's got stylesheet <link> with no media targets, static scripttardery in the markup, HTML 5 shims in 4 tranny document, incomplete markup with almost as many errors as there are lines of code, scripting doing CSS' job on that stupid "hamburger icon" menu garbage (not a fan), malformed forms, and of course the endless pointless DIV and classes typical of the mouth-breathing halfwit nonsense known as bootcrap.

Overall with some tweaks the layout and colour scheme could be saved if the fonts were made dynamic (%/em), some of the pointless space-wasting garbage like the banner area were scrapped so people can actually get to the content when they land on your home page, and things were opened up to be properly semi-fluid, elastic and responsive.

It's the implementation that needs to go in the trash wholesale... swinging an axe at the bloated webfonts, bloated jQuery nonsense and other scripttardery, and ridiculously bloated AND broken bootcrap nonsense. From strictly a code perspective it's a laundry list of how NOT to build a website.