quizzical quincunx :: In Soviet Russia, Website Uses You!

I could go on for days about how government websites are hopelessly mired in a funk of ancient design practices and proprietary databases - or I could just point you here, where the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services has kindly made my point for me. Among the snafus:

Three separate stylesheets. Three: one for IE, one for Navigator 5 and up, and one for the rest - plus the browser detection code is crude.
Those image links are killing me. They're ugly, they're unnecessary, the rollovers don't even line up properly. Worse, they're backed up by some horrendous-looking JavaScript that could be rewritten in about five lines even without pulling in anything like jQuery.
Searching the site for CSS turns up...no results. How do you write about website usability without once mentioning CSS!? Simple: throw in a bunch of process jargon. And you wonder why these government websites never finish their usability reviews...
That aside, finding anything on this site is a bit of a chore. Either I go with Search and receive what I'll refer to as "context-free results", or I poke through their gangly tab-list-hyperlink structure. Wait, never mind - this makes everything so much clearer, right?

posted by Dolores at 00:38 on 2011.11.29

I suggest adding a facebook like button for the blog!

posted by Evan Stratford at 07:47 on 2009.02.27

But...but it's W3C HTML 4.01 Transitional-compliant! :p

posted by Valkyrie Savage at 22:44 on 2009.02.26

:)

If you want to see a truly unfortunate website, you should consider examining IU's CS website. cs.indiana.edu. It's ouch. I was actually in a focus group recently where we attempted to decide why our website still looks like it was written in 1998. I especially like how you have to click "load image" for individual pictures on the faculty page.