Guy McLaren

I was pointed at this website and asked my opinion. I came, I saw and fell over I was laughing so hard. Seriously I heard a rumour that the owner of this website claims to be a web developer and designer. I know a few months ago I was involved in a major todo about a package I produced. My detractors called it 1996 design. You see rather than use CSS I used tables to simplify it for my clients but this site takes a lot to beat.

Lets start by looking at the headers. The first give away that this site is designed by someone not up to speed with technology is that Meta Name generator that says Microsoft Front Page 3.0. Serious developers will never take a Front Page designer seriously. This is a package designed for secretarys to knock up a home page for businesses that are too cheap to spring for a real site.

<meta name=”GENERATOR” content=”Microsoft FrontPage 3.0″>
<title>dB2K Network … Gateway to dWorld … tracking dBeast</title>
<meta NAME=”description” CONTENT=”dB2K Network … Gateway to the world of dBASE.”>
<meta NAME=”keywords” CONTENT=”dbase db2k database applications development vdbase dbase2000 db2000 visual dbase tips tricks wizards help how to apache frontpage iis cgi xbase”>
<meta NAME=”language” CONTENT=”English”>
<meta NAME=”AUTHOR” CONTENT=”Colyn Serfontein“>

But having said that much has been done to Front Page since version 3.0. I wonder whether this bloke has heard that Windows 98 has been replaced with Windows ME. Front Page 2003 is now available according to the Microsoft website. I believe there was another version or two between 3.0 and 2003 but as I am not a Front Page user I could be wrong, But we can accept that this designer is not at the leading edge of technology.

The next clue is that he is using DBASE as a database. I won’t pull DBASE to pieces because its good software well in its day it was the best. Everyone was using DBASE in the 80’s but tell you what lets see what Wikipedia has to say about how mainstream DBASE is. Your biggest problem here is not that the system quits on you its that the programmer ups and dies on you and you will have to find one of the 3 people that still use DBASE to make any changes.

From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBase

“Although the language has fallen out of favor as a primary business language, some find dBase an excellent interactive ad-hoc data manipulation tool. Whereas SQL retrieves data sets from a relational database (RDBMS), with dBase one can more easily manipulate, format, analyze and perform calculations on individual records, strings, numbers, and so on in a step-by-step imperative (procedural) way instead of trying to figure out how to use SQL’s declarative operations.“

OK so I knew theres a good reason for using DBASE for forums and other services because you can more easily manipulate strings and calculations… Oh no, can this be true that I have been using MYSQL for the last two years with millions of others database developers and we could do the calculations without having to figure out those pesky SQL declaritive operations.

Lets move on to the next mistake made by this intrepid developer. Framesets in 2008, sorry 2009. Once again this is technology that was superseded by Tables, and now CSS. The main reason frames fell out of favour were because the Search Engines don’t like them. I quote html-faq.com

<frameset framespacing=”0″ border=”false” frameborder=”0″ rows=”81,*”>
<frame name=”banner” scrolling=”no” noresize target=”contents” src=”db2k_banner.htm” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”3″>
<frameset cols=”135,*”>

<frame name=”contents” target=”main” src=”db2k_content.htm” scrolling=”auto” marginwidth=”4″>
<frame name=”main” src=”db2kmain.htm” scrolling=”auto”>
</frameset>
<noframes>

“Its common to see frames abused by newbies in implementing a left-hand menu and top banner layout with the mistaken belief its easier to maintain and makes downloading quicker. There are numerous problems this implementation raises typically related to the paradox it creates.”

and

“When bookmarking a page, visitors expect to bookmark the exact page of information, but the frameset gets bookmarked instead so when users follow this bookmark they then have to hunt for the relevant page every time. This is the drawback of breaking the Web guideline of a one-to-one mapping between URLs and resources.”

and

“Search engines have problems with framed websites because of the frames paradox. This results in unframed pages being indexed and linked to, so typically the user sees the first page without the frameset, and typically without navigation (known as blackhole pages). By adding navigation links to the content, the developer has lost the advantage of separating content from presentation and navigation.

“You can get around search engine problems by creating a doorway page full of your keywords, and then redirecting to the frameset” - Going from the frying pan into the fire, this technique pushes all search engine traffic to doorway pages, effectively duplicating the content. The visitor is then expected to manually surf through the frameset finding what they were supposed to get to from the search engine”

Enough said, I think this intrepid developer need to call in a professional to help him fix his site, He may even get some traffic then. I would also suggest he that he does some research on mysql and the benefits of moving into the 20th century.