George Rosier's portfolio & blog site

Sun4U collapsed late on 11th August, stranding hundreds (BBC article explains a bit here). The website directs people to call ABTA for more info, and all looks lost.

To be honest though, looking at that website, I’d be VERY hesitant to trust them in the first place:

• It looks like a dog’s dinner: this isn’t a crime in itself, but the homepage is a complete bombsite – bad Flash animations, little in the way of content, inconsistent wording/capitalisation…it just looks crap.
• It’s been built entirely in Dreamweaver: again this isn’t a crime, but hardly the hallmark of an industry-standard website.
• This is a 12-page site (including the homepage) – and the way it’s built means it’s very un-search-friendly…yet it has managed to become Pagerank 2 (I know PR supposedly doesn’t stand for a lot these days, but still)
• Commented-out code: again, not a crime – but it’s for content that was from Easter….?
• The Google Analytics tracking code is in the header: definitely not a crime, but it’s meant to go in the footer
• No robots.txt

All in all, it looked like a bad idea from the outset in my opinion. Bye bye Sun4U.

Firstly, apologies for the silence: Real Life seems to be happening, and Twitter has taken a backseat – as have reviews. Anyway: I’m back!

I was recently looking at flights to Greece, and as part of my research phase I visited the ubiquitously-orange EasyJet site…and I bet you can guess what’s coming up next! Yup – Review Time! God, my life’s incredible.

How did it fare? Do the bargain-basement brand values carry through to their site? Read on and find out!

Disclaimer: I’ve used false dates for the purposes of this review – so don’t bother coming to my house to steal my pants on the dates shown in the screenshots. I will be in, and will summarily execute underwear thieves. Unless you come bearing fig rolls, in which case you’ll be robbed of them first – and then executed. Understood? Good.

Another disclaimer: If you don’t like the colour orange, don’t read this article.

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In the latter months of 2009 Alamy.com, a stock imagery site, ran a competition to redesign their homepage.

That in itself was all well and good: throwing it open to the public and offering cash to the winner is a great way of engaging with their users and – incidentally – getting shitloads of design options created for what is essentially a fraction of the price they’d have had to pay an agency (if you were to include all their associated fees etc).

Anyway, one of the flaws of the competition – in my personal opinion – was that it insisted one use the imagery from the Alamy collection. No real problem in that, but it meant that in order to enter a design which featured imagery, one had to buy the imagery from the site.

That annoyed me, since I was quite willing to create free designs for them – but I’m damned if I’m about to be forced to pay for the privilege. As such, I abandoned the competition with literally a few hours to go ’till the closing date.

Perhaps egotistically, I thought the designs I came up with were ok…so I’ve decided to put them up here to be scrutinised, criticised, and generally pulled apart by anyone who has an opinion – and that should mean you, whoever you are.

Want to see them? Reckon it’s about time I got critique’d myself after I’ve been reviewing all these websites? Fancy an insight into what kind of twisted logic my mind goes through? Read on!

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Whilst looking for some news story providers, I decided to check out the AP (Associated Press) site, www.ap.org. I was after some quick info about news story feeds/aggregation, and possibly some stock imagery.

What happened on my thrilling journey? What was their site like? I know you can’t wait to find out, really. It’s the only thing that’s keeping you going, isn’t it? Admit it. It’s fine.

Read my (admittedly brief) review here!

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It’s self-indulgent, but here you go: I’m in this month’s Web Designer Magazine (issue 163), delivering 100 words of carefully-crafted guff about my favourite worst website.

Web Designer Mag, Issue 163

Can you guess who’s it was?