If you didn’t know that on most forms on most web pages you can press the TAB key to move from one field to the next, or if you’re the type of person who prefers to use your mouse, this post isn’t for you because this post is my latest Web design (bad) post (it also counts as Whining). Today’s culprit? Panera Bread® of Central Ohio.

If you’ve visited my blog before, you may know that I like Panera, I really do. One of the things I like about Panera is that on every receipt is a link to a “tell us how we are doing” survey, a survey whose completion enters you into a drawing to win $2,000. What a great way to build customer loyalty.

The web developer who created the survey website for Panera, however, cares less about customer loyalty and smart user interfaces and more about making sure no one types numbers into his or her numeric fields. Look at the source for one of the panerasurvey.com pages, and you’ll see that numeric fields have onKeyPress="return TextCounterNumber()" attached. If you’re not a web developer, all you need to understand is that this bit of code looks at every character you type into the associated fields to determine whether it’s valid or not. Numbers are valid. Anything else is not.

That’s not so bad. It’s making sure users can’t mess things up by typing letters into a field that should have only numbers. Kinda smart.

Here’s the bad part. On the vast majority of forms on the web, users are not forced to take their hands off their keyboards and use their mouses to click on the next field in a form. That’s something the web inherited from non-web forms. Never mind that the vast majority of computers users may not realize they can advance from field to field with the TAB key; web developers should know that.

You may think this isn’t worth complaining about, and in the grand scheme of things, you’re right. But Panera’s survey includes a screen on which they ask people to tell them of any concerns, and I’ve mentioned the fact that their survey form doesn’t adhere to web standards. Yes, it’s a small annoyance, but it’s also something that would be incredibly easy to fix. It’s also something I’m reminded of each and every time I go to fill out a Panera survey, something I’m prompted to do by each and every receipt I get from Panera.

What finally prompted me to write about this? Something else about Panera that bothered me—a Panera staff person not bothering to wipe off a drippy drink before handing it to me. So far that’s happened only once (and it wasn’t my favorite Panera staff person who did it), so I’ll leave that whining for another day (although, as it happens, my best friend just stopped by my desk as I was writing this, and he said, about the drippy drinks, not the poorly designed web form, “Oh, yeah, I hate when they do that”).

Neither the folks at The Melting Pot®, which is sponsoring a sweepstakes for the new movie Valentine's Day, nor the folks at Brandmovers®, which created the fun site for the sweepstakes — meltingpotvdaysweeps.com, noticed the typo smack dab at the top of their fun game (click to embiggen):

#5

(See DDN Fail #1, #2, #3 and #4)

Given that the staff of the Dayton Daily News can’t be bothered to proofread the links they themselves set up on their website, it should be no surprise that they also can’t be bothered to monitor comments left on their website by fine members of their reading audience, comments that others of their readers are invited to “report [as] abuse,” but really, why would anyone bother to report abusive comments since it seems that the majority of comments found on the DDN are abusive?

Today the DDN has an article about the upcoming Dayton mayoral election, and sure enough, it’s attracted some ignorant, racist, and vulgar comments, the text of one in particular of which I will not type out here for fear of attracting the wrong kind of Google searchers but which you can read in the image to the right. This particular comment was posted at 9:42 a.m., the racist two below it were posted at 9:40 a.m. and 9:24 a.m., and it was two hours later when I discovered them on the site. If you go to the comments for this article now, you’ll see that someone did finally click on “REPORT ABUSE,” spurring a DDN staffer to finally remove the abusive comments.

It seems to me, however (and yes, this isn’t the first time I’ve done so), that the DDN could copy a feature from nytimes.com and institute moderated comments, at least on articles which would attract comments in need of moderation. The DDN doesn’t publish each and every letter to the editor they receive, so why should they publish every single comment submitted on their website?

Unless, of course, the DDN would rather to continue to sink down to the gutter instead of to aim for the sky.

Update 09/07/2009: Wow, a day later and there are still ignorant people leaving unmoderated comments. Comments such as these are exactly the reason why the DDN should go to moderated comments instead of allowing people to spew shit and then clean up belatedly afterwards.

#4

(See DDN Fail #1, #2 and #3)

Earlier this month I wrote about an annoying Dayton Daily News fail involving the search function on their site. This morning I found that in addition to it’s sometimes not being possible to use their search to find stories you know exist on their site, it's also impossible to rely on the links the DDN staff themselves put up on their site.

As you can see from the screen shots to the right, one of today’s “Stories you’ll want to read” is an editorial that declares that “Ohio pensions already cost enough.” Well, for once, this was indeed a story I wanted to read (many of the stories they think I’ll want to read, I really have no interest in), so I clicked on the link… and found myself on a helpful page that told me they couldn’t find the page I requested and perhaps the story I wanted was “an older news story” and thus no longer available except in the DDN archives. Brilliant.

Also, don’t try going to the DDN Opinion page, where the top listing under “Local editorials and commentaries” is this same “Ohio pensions already cost enough” article, because the link there also does not work.

And, God forbid, do not try typing “Ohio pensions already cost enough” in the (un)helpful search box at the bottom of their “We can’t find the page you requested” page, because if you do, you’ll be redirected to a page that says “Page Not Found — We’re sorry. The Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.” How helpful is it to include a search function on your 404 page when the search function DOES NOT WORK!!

Rule #1 of web development, Cox Ohio Media — whenever you update something on the web, go test it immediately afterwards. No one’s perfect (I don’t even claim to be), and because we all make mistakes, we need to check our work. I’m no newspaper guru, but I understand that in the olden days, this was often done by a proofreader. I do develop websites myself for a living (and yes, sometimes make mistakes), but every single time I create a link, I check it after publishing it to make sure it works, especially if it’s a link I’m highlighting (as in something such as “Stories you’ll want to read”).

The Dayton Daily News, a never-ending source of material for my Web design (bad) tag.

#3

(See DDN Fail #1 and #2)

My friend John was quoted today in the Dayton Daily News in a piece by Joanne Huist Smith about a planned historical marker for famous lesbian Daytonian Natalie Barney. He told me about the article, and so I went to the DDN website to look for it. Entered “Natalie Barney” in the handy dandy search field at the top of every DDN webpage, clicked on the “SEARCH” button (powered by YAHOO!) and got…   nothing related to Natalie Barney whatsoever.

So I popped over to Google and searched for “site:daytondailynews.com Natalie Barney,” and sure enough, the article for which I was looking was the very first result.

So what does this prove? Well, first, it proves that Google’s better than YAHOO! for searching, which is no big surprise. But it’s yet another illustration of the Cox Ohio media team’s web-ineptness. How difficult could it possibly be for them to come up with a search function in-house that includes the articles published most recently on their own website? Yes, they’re no New York Times (they’re really no New York Times!), but why wouldn’t they want to copy some of the features of nytimes.com?

This illustrates something else as well, namely that Google News, instead of being a threat to newspapers by aggregating their content, is actually an asset to newspapers by making it easier for newspapers’ readers to find the content on newspapers’ websites. Plus it shows that Cox Ohio made a poor bargain when they chose to out-source their search to YAHOO!.

(Click to embiggen)

EasyParkDowntown.org as it looks in Firefox
(click to embiggen)


EasyParkDowntown.org as it looks in Internet Explorer
(click to embiggen)

Today's award for poor website design goes to none other than the Dayton City Paper, which underwent a major redesign (for the worse, in my opinion) in the past year. I've never been a frequent visitor to the site, although I do manage to pick up a hardcopy of the paper every week. Their previous online incarnation was at least usable, pretty much text only, but with a newspaper, the text of the articles is probably the most important part, right? Wrong, at least according to the Dayton City Paper, which has decided not to publish any text at all on its online site, only pictures.

So long as you don't use screen reader software (just one of many reasons websites should be mainly in text), you can read every page of the Dayton City Paper, provided that you don't find the font size too small. If you do find the text too small to read, tough shit, because it's not really text at all but a JPG of the page, and thus increasing the font size in your browser does zilch. You could try something like the Image Zoom extension for Firefox, but a bit-mapped image of text zoomed to 200% is only marginally easier to read.

Perhaps the most important reason websites are text-based is that text is easy to search. Not on the Dayton City Paper's website though. They realize visitors to their website will want to search, and they mock us by putting a picture of a search field at the top of their site. Yes, literally a picture of a search field, not even a real field that does nothing. How insane is that?

That the folks at Dayton City Paper even bother to save their calendar pages as images and upload them to their website is beyond my comprehension. Do they think that having those calendar pages online in that form is useful to anyone? Can you read the example calendar item to the left?

Now posting their pages as images does make life easier on the Dayton City Paper staff and might also make their advertisers happy (every ad is shown online exactly as it appears in the print edition), and they needn't worry about people plagiarizing one of their articles by cutting and pasting. I guess if the City Paper staff is happy, who cares whether the site's useful to readers?

One last whine about the Dayton City Paper before I move on, and that is that I find it incredibly annoying that they list contactus@daytoncitypaper.com as the e-mail address alongside the info about any of the authors of their articles, even if an author doesn't work for them. For example, last July they published an article by Dan Frosch (and misspelled his last name in the byline). Googling for the syndicated article, I found Dan Frosch's real e-mail address (and the real spelling of his name).

Now given that I sometimes like to make fun of the Dayton City Paper's larger rival, the Dayton Daily News, it's only fair that I point out that in comparison to daytoncitypaper.com, daytondailynews.com is a real pleasure. Actually Cox has really improved daytondailynews.com over the past year or so, by doing the following things:

• No longer using Flash to display photos
• No longer charging for access to the text of articles in their online archives
• Publishing contact information (phone and e-mail) for the reporters who write DDN articles (and these reporters are willing to answer questions posed by e-mail—very helpful)
• Making Dayton Daily News content available via RSS
• Having content not available in the print editions available online (blogs such as Scott Elliott's on local education are a good local news source)

Now I realize the Dayton City Paper can't hope to compete with the resources the Dayton Daily News has (just as the DDN can't compete with the truly nice newspaper website the New York Times has), but that doesn't mean it has to shoot itself in the foot with a lame-ass image-only website. (An independent weekly that has a site I admire is Seattle's the Stranger, home of "Savage Love", a sex advice column by the paper's editor, Dan Savage, who once told me I was an idiot.)

This is just another brief whine about the misuse of Flash on the web for forms. Today's culprit is SuperCuts, who will give you $2 off the first time and $1 each time off thereafter if you sign up for their haircut reminder service.

Unlike the fine folks at KYintrigue, SuperCuts doesn't think babies born last year will be signing up (you have to be 18 at SuperCuts but not at KY), but their form is plagued by the usual problems. You can tab from first name to last name, but hit tab again and you land on email address. Don't they want you to fill out birthday? Sure they do (it's asterisked), but you must use your mouse to enter it. Ugh.

What makes stuff like this worse is the premium that corporate types are paying to get it. I know of a national organization that paid $10,000 for a Flash-based web site and then wondered afterwards why they couldn't do things like highlight text and copy it or bookmark individual pages, all the sorts of things people have learned to expect from regular HTML pages. What's even more insane is that it takes extra time (and thus extra money) to develop these forms in Flash that lack the functionality of regular HTML forms. Oh, but they're pretty, aren't they?

kyintrigue.com's pretty but non-functional form