Captain Potts: Your rank?
James Bailey: Well, that's a matter of opinion.
(Carry on Sergeant, 1958)
In the second of this erratic series of posts
about web site problems, I want to take a look at a problem which
I’m going to call the Curse of Gerald Scarfe.
We were reviewing a companies existing web
site before developing a new, content managed site. The
existing site wasn’t bad, a little out of date, a slightly dated
design and hard to maintain because it didn’t have a content
management system. However something wasn’t quite
right. The site was illustrated with high quality images of
business people at work. There was something slightly
unnatural about them, as though they had been taken from the odd
angles that were trendy in Reportage in the late ‘80s. The
images' proportions had been distorted when they’d been added to
the site, not far enough to be really noticeable but enough to have
an effect. Unfortunately the result wasn’t a Gerald Scarfe
cartoon but rather off-putting, long-faced people.
Fortunately one of the benefits of using a CMS
for their new site was that the image sizes were automatically
included by the system. So the Curse
of Gerald Scarfe (opens new window) couldn’t creep back into
their new site.