Funny how advances in technology just create new ways of annoying people.

In a previous post I talked about how animated gif’s and embedded music are marks of an amateur’s web site. Of course these days, animated gif’s are quite old school, and flash is now the weapon of choice for over-dressing one’s web site. I was checking out the official Grey’s Anatomy web site and found my ears assaulted by the song’s theme. Of course they were nice enough to put an “off” button on the page, but really, no one likes it when a song starts to play without warning. I could be surfing in a room with my grandmother sleeping a few feet away, didn’t they think of that?

I have no problems with flash per se: it has some pretty cool applications, such as online games and playing videos on a movie site. Flash is kind of like a really sharp blade — useful if used for the right reasons, such as when a surgeon wields a scalpel, but if used for the wrong reasons, it could bring death and destruction upon its victims. OK, so I’m being melodramatic. As far as I know, no one has died from an overuse of Flash. At least not yet. But you get the idea.
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Zamboanga.net opens with two of my pet peeves: a welcome page and a horizontally scrolling line of text.

What’s wrong with welcome pages, you ask? Before we get into that, I have a list of situations where I think welcome/splash pages are necessary:

1. Everything on the site is password protected, and the welcome page is also the login page.
2. The site has adult content, and you want to give your viewer adequate warning.
3. You’re a flash artist and you want your work (on a splash page) to be the first thing the viewers see.
4. The site is a film site, in which case it’s basically a web version of a promotional trailer.

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For all you book freaks out there, Fully Booked now has a website.

It’s not completely done. Or, at least, I hope they’re planning to do more work on it. Most of the content is presented as images, the forms don’t validate, and half the menu items don’t work. I suppose they needed to get online in time to announce their new writing contest, the First Philippine Graphic/Fiction Award.

Where to start? First of all, they have to hire a proper web developer to turn the images into actual text, maybe format it nicely in CSS. Except for the sidebar, the design is quite good. SEO-wise, the site is a disaster: the page titles have nothing descriptive (some pages are actually titled “MASTER”), and (except for a couple of pages) the content is in image format (Google can’t read it). There aren’t even any metatags to speak of.
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The good news is, you can book flights online any time of the day at Cebu Pacific’s web site. The bad news is, they’re likely to offer you a discount even when there aren’t any available.

It was all terribly misleading. Although my sister had offered to pay for my plane ticket to the province, I thought I’d save her a few bucks by looking around for discounted tickets. So I went online and booked a round-trip flight with Cebu Pacific, and was pleased to see they had a promo that let you get a ticket for nearly half the regular price. The site even had a nifty pop-up page where you could compute how much your ticket would cost.
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It had been a while since I last checked into my domain manager account at dotPH. So I logged in a few days ago, and found everything almost the same as when I last logged in more than a year ago. I also logged into my affiliate account (Why isn’t there a clear link to this on the main page?) because I wanted to set up referral ads on my web sites.

First of all, the HTML code for the banners is wrong. I remember it’s supposed to include the affiliate’s e-mail address in the link to dotPH, which it doesn’t anymore. Which means that if you use that link, you’re just creating a link to dotPH, but you won’t be credited for the referral.
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As I am going to take a little trip to my hometown soon, I decided to see how Internetted it is these days. So I Googled it, and found a bunch of sites.

Zamboanga.com
This one’s an Internet portal. I know a lot of really good artists back home, so you’ll have to pardon me for asking the question: Why is this site so fugly? Not only is the, uh, design painful to look at, it isn’t even consistent throughout the site — were the colors in each page determined by whatever shirt the, uh, designer had on that day? Plus, FRAMES. I hate frames, and this site just reminded me why.

Content-wise, Zamboanga.com isn’t that bad. The site has lots of useful information such as tourist spots, the history of the city and editorial articles (although the latest one is dated a year ago). I’d happily recommend the site to anyone who wants to know more about the town, if only it weren’t so painful to look at.

The site doesn’t have a section that displays company information, neither does it have a contact form or an e-mail one can write to for inquiries or feedback. If the people behind Zamboanga.com want to improve their portal, I suggest these would be the first problems they take care of. Maybe they just need someone to tell them to get rid of those damn frames.

Next: Zamboanga.net