Tim Dobson's Blog

I don't know what you realise. All I know is the links Tim posted.

OK, so when we're recruiting new members into our webmaster cooperative, should I basically count an A2 Applied ICT website project as only necessarily demonstrating a basic "knows that you upload an html file to a webserver" level?

Which exam board is this? I'll send them a comment on their mark scheme if you tell me, for all the difference it'll make.

Okay, I wrote this yesterday but couldn't submit the post. Hopefully it'll be third time lucky:

I've only had a quick look but what I've spotted so far:

None of them use favicons.

Suzie's Sunshine holidays:
The colour is painful to look at.
It has a giant wmv applet thing that I can't view and which also obscures the footer.
It uses frames.
It has a CSS parsing error. It also renders terribly in FF3, this could be due to the CSS.
Has no way of getting back to the home page that I can see.

Limos4Vips:
Much better. The colour is nice and the rendering is fine, although the sub-menus are appearing strangely.
Some attempt at accessibility, which is nice. Although the 'Info' link in the footer appears in a pop-up window which is unnecessary and inconsistent.
Some of the menu items don't work, you have to click on the sub menus instead, which is annoying

Fake Holiday Company:
Similar rendering problems as the first one and same problem with the wmv (although it's smaller at least so is less of an issue).
Uses a scroll tag in the footer - this is always wrong.
Feedback page is inconsistent with the rest, it looks unfinished?
Has no way of getting back to the home page that I can see.
I'm not sure if I like the duplicate menus, they seem a little unnecessary.

OK, I'm probably going in a bit heavy, but here's what I think:-

Suzie's Sunshine Holidays - fairly complete (missing the sitemap), good use of pages like FAQ and About Us, framed, flash, contrast is bad if images aren't loaded, some pages have "page" in their file names, invalid html (18 errors at a glance) which I'm not sure whether it's machine- or man-made. Seems to use several third-party counters, which I think contradicts the site privacy policy's promise not to pass on user data. The site also mentions some old legislation, but not more recent ones like the distance selling regs. At least it has a privacy policy, which I didn't see on either of the other sites.

Limos4vips - good contrast, javascript content-changing problems, javascript-only accessibility links (which is a daft idea always), good use of contact details and forms (except maybe the "Submit Form" label), invalid html (65 errors at a glance) with tables used for layout, but otherwise looks man-made.

Fake Holiday company - low contrast, uses white text for spacing instead of using CSS, PDF booking form seems a strange choice for a web site, no link back to homepage? no page titles? invalid html (44 errors at a glance) which looks like it's been generated by a program and had the Generator meta-tag edited out. Dynamic Drive javascript is a bad thing to use because it usually breaks accessibility assistance.

The first two entrants in particular show some promise, but all have serious problems so I'd refer them back to the students for corrections. If I'm honest, they're actually no worse than a lot of real websites, really, even if I'd like things to be better.