Puts on my "Simon Cowell of web design" hat... If you've ever read my analysis of peoples websites on SitePoint or Digital Point, you'll know what that means... and wow, I've not done this to a BT site since BattleCorps was launched -- and that was sent internally -- Should be fun.
1) the white text on orange is below accessibility norms making the menu hard to read. Likewise the "The board game" text -- on top of being silly as already noted, has legibility issues; I had to have someone else read it to me!
2) the use of absurdly undersized fixed metric fonts on the menu and presence of more menu elements than fit a normal horizontal menu render it useless to large font/120dpi users.
3) The crappy fixed width that isn't even 1024 friendly pretty much flushes my visiting the main part of the website from my netbook... or my tablet... or even from my normal desktop browser since while I'm on a 1920 wide display, I happen to run the browser at half width so I have room for other stuff on screen. (like IM's)
4) lose the massive images for nothing.
5) even out the paddings, for the most part everything kinda looks just slapped in there any old way.
6) the broken/nonexistant heading orders (everything's a H3?!?) makes it difficult to key/voice navigate.
7) Shouldn't the Topps logo link to Topps website and not the massive version of the logo? Of course that it's all alpha transparency .pngs shows that whoever was doing the images hasn't quite grasped what "Internet" means... or is actually gullible enough to believe that Photoshop's "save for web" actually has a clue what it's doing -- * NEWS FLASH * -- it doesn't. Blue blazes, the pathetically crippled "The GIMP" does a better job...
8 ) the presence of HTML 5 some decade before anyone has any business using it to build a website pretty well shtups most of the IE6 users; who contacted me en-masse saying "please tell me you had nothing to do with this" -- that was fun... and NO, a javascript "shiv" is NOT THE ANSWER. It's called DRAFT for a reason -- which is why it's better to stay with "RECOMMENDATION" instead... the latest real world deployable W3C Recommendations being HTML 4.01 STRICT or XHTML 1.0 STRICT. NOT that HTML 5 offers anything useful to web developers other than some 'gee ain't it neat' bullshit and bloated allegedly semantic tags to be abused; It's carefully crafted for the people who the past decade were vomiting up HTML 3.2 putting a 4 transitional doctype on it and calling themselves 'modern' -- nothing like being in transition from 1997 to 1998. So now instead of slapping a tranny on it, the sleazeball shortcut crap out sites any old way folks can give it 5 lip-service.... HTML 5, setting website development practices back a decade. (at least if you talk the parts of it that have anything to do with markup... which is probably why they slapped the gee ain't it neat new scripting and CSS3 under it's banner, without which it offers NOTHING).
9) The home page is 791k in 41 files... that is almost five times the upper limit I would allow for a single page on a website!
The file count ALONE is outright scary, but entirely typical of your off the shelf Wordpress rubbish.
Hell, you can tell it's ineptly coded by using some simple logic -- there's only 3k of plaintext on the page with seven actual CONTENT images... so 40k of markup? In other words four times as much code as should be neccessary... That it blows an unbelievable 98k on CSS and STILL has an ungodly 16k of static CSS inlined in the HTML shows that whoever built that skin needs to do the world a favor, back the **** away from the keyboard, and take up something a bit less dangerous like bocce or horseshoes.
Though again that's just turdpress taking a dump on any site it's involved in. When hardcoded outside the skinning system it shoves markup like this down your throat:
<li id="menu-item-550" class="menu-item menu-item-type-post_type menu-item-object-page current-menu-item page_item page-item-17 current_page_item menu-item-550"><a href="http://bg.battletech.com/" >Home</a></li>
It's the LAST thing that should EVER be used to build a website; I don't care how 'easy it is' to use on the back end, or that people who know nothing about making websites can use it -- it basically flushes anything built with it. (which is why to even build a halfway decent site with it you have to neuter 2/3rds of it's code base, shtupping your upgrade path... shades of phpBB2)... Wordpress, for and by people who know nothing about websites... THINK ABOUT THAT.
There's a reason Wordpress is for crappy little personal blogs and not for websites of real companies... well, on top of it being the 2008 pwnie winner for M4ss 0wnage since it has security holes big enough to cruise a McKenna class warship through and knee deep in idiotic bloated sleazy shortcuts like jQuery. As Dan used to say, the only thing you can learn from jQuery is how not to write JavaScript. (and the only thing you can learn from Dreamweaver is how not to build websites)... and Christmas on a cracker, it's not even using the minified version of jQuery?!? Bad enough having the idiotic bloated library with hordes of fat slow off the shelf scripting, but then to not even use the minified 'for deployment' versions of said scripts?!?
NOT that Wordpress can be blamed for the images -- I already helped out a bit by getting you some better optimized versions, but much of the imagery reeks of the "but I can do it in photoshop" idiocy. Lands sakes, 90% of the content area is just flat gray -- you have seven thumbnails ... what the devil is it doing with 473k of images in 19 files?!? Much less that STUPID 'new' logo which doesn't seemed designed for print (give how crappy it looks on all the products just slapped in there any old way) or web (since it doesn't fit common dimensions and is non-orthagonal) certainly doesn't help... but I've been complaining about that since FanPro introduced it, which is why you'll notice I never actually used it on the website and instead took the border thing off of it and/or ajusted it to fit/grow/tile.
Of course, that the server STILL isn't sending any of the files mod_deflate/gzipped -- something that should have been set up before websites were even installed on it... well, that just takes an already massive and slow website and drags it's performance into the deepest circle of hell. First-load here takes >40 seconds and subsequent pages take >10 seconds -- that's RIDICULOUS since I'm on a 22mbps connection. That's something that should take about fifteen seconds to enable from the shell assuming Apache has been built properly, 2 minutes if it has library compatibility enabled, 20 minutes if you have to rebuild it. NONE of which even involves any downtime!
I'd love to see a "<?php phpInfo(); ?>" output from said server -- given the abysmal performance of the forums and website and lack of compressed output, I bet it doesn't even have a PHP caching accelerator installed. As it is it's been a real laugh the 501 errors ever 8 hours or so... and even better the 502 "bad gateway" errors which likely means the server is misconfigured, some stupid caching tool like "Varnish" is in there screwing things up, or something upstream of it in the data center is barfing out. (Being it's on Rackspace, I'd not be surprised -- they may be rated tier 2 but their service is tier 999,999... oh, it's still up so it counts as uptime...RIGHT)
Whoever you've had doing this (who apparently won't come out in public to play) should hang their head in shame at their ineptitude. I've not seen anything this bad since the steaming pile we know as BattleCorps...
Which was always a laugh that a project who's entire revenue stream is web based couldn't be bothered to pick up a decent web developer... Not really surprising none of the other Catalyst sites even show up on Google properly and even with a proper 301 the search mojo for "battletech" is going through the floor.
Of course, that this was a last minute no planning snap decision is where most of the real problems lay -- maybe if instead of letting me continue to pluck away on my new codebase for a month for no good reason, you had said "We're going to go ahead with something else, could you help"... But NO....
Ah well, NMFP anymore. You want to revert back to worse than when Warner was hand editing a site using HotMetal, knock yourselves out.
