Let me preface this with a caveat: I am not a professional webdesigner. At best, I’m an enthusiastic amateur. I don’t ever want to be more than that; I actually have a lot of sympathy for people who do that kind of work, and deal with the kind of muppets they need to. Really, really truly.

However.

We’re currently in the process of a rebranding at work, and the website (which is in desperate need of it) is part of that project. The whole thing has been dragged out for an awfully long time, and at this point, I’m not sure whether the fault for that is with us or with the company we’ve engaged to do the work. Either way, it’s ridiculous.

Finally, however, we have a working mock-up of what the new website will look like, which has been handed over to us for approval.

And it looks good.

Except…

It uses dropdown menus, which is fine, but only if they’re done well. They’re… not. I haven’t looked into the code to see how they’ve done them, but whatever method they’ve used, the submenus tend to disappear before one can actually click on them: as soon as your mouse is not hovering over the top-level menu, they’re gone. Most of the time, but not always, leaving me utterly confused. And if I’m struggling…

Moreover, not everything lines up perfectly when you’re using, for example, Chrome. Isn’t cross-browser testing standard these days?

And then there’s the problem that the design breaks when viewed on a mobile device. I can only assume they’re intending to create a second version of the site that is mobile friendly, and simply haven’t done so yet… but since they’re supposedly about ready to hand it all over to us, I’m not sure.

It certainly doesn’t pass W3C validation checks. (Admittedly, neither does this blog, but I didn’t design it, and I’m still intending to go through and try and fix it, because that annoys me.)

I get so tired of sloppy webdesign. So tired of websites that don’t work in all (modern) browsers.

It really shouldn’t be this hard.

/rant.