Elf Sternberg

I am so tempted to mail this to my former "benefits provider:"

Attention, "corporate service provider" schmucks! The following notice on your website is not only a sign of incompetence, assholiness, and a general lack of concern for your customer's well-being, at this point it indicates an almost dysfunctional malevolence on your part:

This site has been optimized for use with Microsoft Internet Explorer browser version 5.5 or higher.
Please check with the Microsoft Website at www.microsoft.com for a browser upgrade.

No, I won't check with Microsoft, as nobody in my house is running a Microsoft-based OS. It's all Macintosh and Linux here, guys. 22% of the home user market is now non-MS. You are failing one-fifth of your market. Your website doesn't work at all with Firefox, looks horrible in Safari, and boots users out the first time some MS-only exploit fails. Get yourself a better collection of designers and developers.

Hell, hire me.

I don't feel so bad now. Tina's website went live this afternoon at http://www.electtinaorwall.com, and Omaha showed me the other two candidate's websites: Vote Todd Gibson and Tan Cares. They're both Wordpress sites.

Tan's is obviously done by someone with a primitive sense of design; the way his picture is situated above the poorly photographed flag in his banner shows a very poor sense of layout, and I bet the dropshadows came with the original theme on which his is based. The contrast is bad on the right-hand nav bar and it looks like whoever did this wasn't quite comfortable enough with Wordpress to mangle the theme to his liking, as it still looks much more like a blog than a campaign website. The background, with the striped layout, is visually disorienting. And there are no permalinks! That's an official What The.. ? right there.

Todd Gibson's is also a bit messy. The artist put a lot of time into his banner (and what's that funny red bar by the kid's elbow there?) and the rollovers are kinda cute, but does he have to put the "Paid for..." notice at the very top? That's something that goes in the footer, dude. Font selection is routine. I love the Put paypal link here notice... go live before you were ready, Todd? I love all the thank-yous the designers felt obligated to put into the bottom.

Here's the impression I'm getting: I am not an experienced Wordpress hack. I barely speak PHP, and often had a translation guide on my knee while I worked on Tina Orwall's website. But I know my HTML and CSS, and I know what I wanted, and I and my very passionate wife knew exactly how much work we were going to give Tina: enough until the page looked right. Ordinary, pedestrian, yes, but without a clank or a clatter, and that's what we acheived.