How hard do you think it should be to find some information on the Internet? Not very. Google makes it easy to find information, but they don’t host any of it. That means that when Google tells me that it found something I might be interested in, I have to go the source to find it.
While Google does its job very well, the source of the information doesn’t always give it up so easily. For instance, earlier today I wanted to find a brief summary statement of Vincent van Gough’s life. Just a little blurb, nothing fancy like images or some kind of wow-me-silly presentation. Just a line that looked something like “Vincent van Gough was born in … he painted this many paintings in this style. Etc, etc….”
Naturally, I googled the term. Among others, that brought me to the ArtCyclopedia page on Vincent van Gough. But wait, don’t click on that link! Why? Because it’s a redirect page!
After searching for nearly 20 minutes, getting a redirect page was more than just frustrating, it was painful. First of all, there’s no reason at all why a redirect page can’t be automatic. Even a simple http-equiv="refresh" would have been better than making me click the link. I actually spent some time looking for link to the page I was supposed to go to because their link wasn’t clear enough.
Which leads me to point number one about redirects:
Always put the link at the top of the page, and make it as prominent as possible!
To get more technical, there’s actually no reason why a redirect page should be necessary at all! Using sever-side scripting one could easily output a Location HTTP header and be done with it. Alternatively, you could simply put a Redirect permanent line in a .htaccess file. And if you needed anything fancier, Apache’s mod_rewrite can turn any URI into any filename request imagineable!
So in the end, this redirect page wasn’t even necessary!
The real blow hit me when I actually got the right page. The problem here is two-fold.
- No information about Vincent van Gough is directly on the page. You need to click on hyperlinks to find anything out.
- The page is divided into two sections; a navbar sits on the left side of the site. But that navbar is frozen on the screen somehow and doesn’t scroll with the rest of the site! This wouldn’t be a problem if I had a monitor the length of a city block, but as it stands it presents a major navigational problem: I can’t get to the rest of the links, presumably where my desired information is, because the links aren’t accessible!
I wish this were a rare problem, but bad web sites like these exist in abundance all over the place. In the end, I got my information from Jordan, an 8th grader with better design skills than whoever did that blasted ArtCyclopedia design. Thank you Jordan!
