Archive for the 'review' Category

What Irks Me About “Miehen treenikirja” (or what I personally believe sells good content)

Published on 14.8.2009 in book, marketing, rant and review. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Mr Alexander Stubb, the Finnish foreign minister, published a book about physical training and keeping oneself fit (“Miehen treenikirja“).

Mr Stubb is an enthusiastic runner, skier, duathlonist, triathlonist and so on as well as a top-level politician.

Well, fine. Great.

I do think that it’s great that a politician does something else than sits at meetings, too.

Now, the book, “Miehen treenikirja” (with Ilkka Järvimäki).
A book “that motivates a man to move and take care of both physical and mental well-being”.

Yes, I’m tempted to buy it. Really tempted.

But.

What irks me is the price. 36,40 eur for a paperback, only 157 pages?

36,40?

What irks me more is the web shop for the book. Done with frames, no proper titles for pages etc.

Again I say it: this is 2009 for god’s sake! If you want to sell something, stick to what you know how to do!
Don’t use frames (unless you know how to use them!), don’t use flash for content (unless you’re making a game/superfancy fashion site (or something like that) and know how to use it!)

Think about the price, set it to something that sells. (Well, I think Mr Stubb is going to sell his book whatever the price is, so no worries. I personally won’t buy it at this price but then again, I’m a cheap bastard.)

Try something new, like the author of “Droid Maker”.

Miehen treenikirja has the content I want but it certainly hasn’t got the means to sell it to me.

Well, it’s good we still have the public libraries in Finland;)

What’s Wrong With Finnish Theatre (Or My Short Trip to Tampereen teatterikesä)

Published on 5.6.2009 in redesign, review, webdev and wtf. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I’ll continue my series of short reviews (rants?)  with Tampereen Teatterikesä‘s (Tampere Theatre Festival) web page (www.teatterikesa.fi), screenshot below.

etusivu-tampereen-teatterikesa-ry_1244195082896

Tampereen Teatterikesä, Screenshot from front page. Serious issues.

Front page has a picture of masquerade  lady with some human tissue (heart?) at her hands. Groovy!
But that’s not the point.

I got this uncomfortable feeling from just looking at the page, something is wrong. Must be. And yes, something indeed was wrong.

No, I don’t mean the lady with the heart.

I mean the technical side.

What’s wrong, then? Smallish copy-paste helps, like always:

</style><map name="frontpic">
	<area shape="rectangle" alt="" title="" coords="844,590,923,626" href="/suomi/" target="" />
	<area shape="rectangle" alt="" title="" coords="859,630,923,666" href="/in_english/" target="" />
</map>

<table align="center" class="front">
<tr>
	<td><img src="/res/etusivu_new.jpg" width="940" height="680" border="0" alt="" usemap="#frontpic" /></td>
</tr>

What is the problem, really?

Image maps used at 2009? WTF?
And what’s even worse, no alternative texts for links nor the image.

Why does it matter, then?

Well, Google sees nothing at the front page. I think that’s pretty big a deal. See the Google result.

The actual site is pretty ok, according to footer made by my old friend/foe, Optinet. (Screen grab below).

suomi-tampereen-teatterikesa-ry_1244195978382What amazes me, however, is the title for actual front page.  It says “Suomi” (Finland).

WTF?

Otherwise site is pretty ok, technical side is ok (as with Optinet-products most of the time is) but not great.

It’s the small details that irk me.

Small details make the site more invisible to Google and other Search Engines.
Small details make the site inaccessible.

Why not fix them? Just add title- and alt-attributes to front page image map (if it’s really, really needed. If not, why not get rid of the image map and just do texts the normal way, you know, html? Image replacement techniques anyone?)  and fix the title of the actual front page.

Not that hard.

Conclusion

  • Small details matter. If you are order a web site, make sure it’s visible to Google, too.
  • Small details matter. Make sure you know what you are ordering. If you don’t know, ask. Any decent web company will tell you. Ask about the pros and cons of this design. Ask about search engines, ask about mobile use.
  • Ask, ask and ask. If the webdesigner knows what he/she is doing, they’ll answer. Then you’ll know.

Gefilus (Valio revisited)

Published on 17.3.2009 in article, finnish, html, rant, review, seo, test and web. Closed Tags: , , , , .

I wrote a short post about Valio.fi some time ago. In the aftermath I got distracted and Googled Valio (people do strange thing when trying to work).

When going through the results something caught my eye, Gefilus. Google result looks like this:

Valio

Sivusto vaatii toimiakseen selaimen joka tukee freimejä. Ole hyvä ja päivitä selaimesi.
www.gefilus.fi/ – 2k – Välimuistissa – Samankaltaisia sivuja

Yes, you say, and then what, you continue.

Well yes. Gefilus is a Valio product line in which all dairy products include Lactobacillus GG Bacteria and should be healhty for each and every one of us.

Now, that’s not the point.
The point is the Google result for Gefilus which looks exactly like above. (They even have bought a Google Sponsored link to tell what the hell this is all about!)

Why all this?

Finnish text at Google result says (in english):
“This site requires a browser that supports frames to work. Please upgrade your browser.”

My browser? Oh yes, newest Firefox.

Google’s browser? Why that’s a whole different matter – and believe me or not, it’s not Chrome.

Google has no eyes or ears. It doesn’t support Flash or frames properly (and it’s not even supposed to, IMHO). (See Wikipedia on Web Crawlers for more information.)

And as Googlebot, Google’s search robot (or web crawler), doesn’t support frames, the only content Gefilus.fi shows to Bot is the (in principle properly used, mind you) <noframes> -element and it’s content.

Thus the awkward Google result.

Conclusions

  • If you still use frames at 2009, do use the <noframes> -element.
  • … and if you use the noframes-element, put some meaningful content in it, because that may be everything the allmighty Google sees.
  • … and if it’s not in Google, it doesn’t exist, does it?
  • …which leads me to wonder what the hell  the ad agency behind Gefilus.fi thought when doing all this? (Flash, frames, page titles (whole Gefilus.fi is named “Valio” according to HTML)).
    Looks pretty, yeah, contents are fine but what about the technical side?