Caravans... why?!

Caravans have always bemused me. I have never been able to fathom why somebody would want to spend a relatively considerable amount of money on a tiny, cramped, smelly house they can tow around behind them.

Campervans are not much better, though slightly more understandable, depending on the context of their use. I know a few surfers who use them... but that is purely so they can spend more time surfing. Theirs is a surfing lifestyle, not a caravaners lifestyle.

Most people would think I am a typical driver who hates following the meandering lines of caravans through Devon's roads... and I am, but I am not really complaining about the never-ending procession of sluggish neo-troglodytes wending their way through the beautiful countryside... or at least it was beautiful, until some smoking monstrosity towing a white lump of garbage turns up to smog up the place. What I am complaining about is the lifestyle caravaners have chosen fro themselves.

See, what they will do is drive across the country to a field that is filled with more smelly white boxes and park up. Then they will proceed to set up, hooking up their water, if there is such a thing where they have chosen, putting out an awning perhaps, some uncomfortable folding chairs and then cook themselves a lukewarm meal of food poisoning on their ineffectual gas burners. This they will then do for x number of days, until it is time to pack it all away and go home again.

The drawbacks with this kind of holiday are many and we all know what they are, I am sure. But the main puzzle for me is why you would spend anything from £4000 to £20,000 on a caravan in the first place? If you go for the luxury model, you are spending enough money that, if you chose to put that money in a bank account in the first place you would have enough money (and the interest too) to get yourself at the very least nice bed and breakfast joints for the next ten years worth of holidays... and for the top whack you'd probably have enough to pay for some very nice foreign holidays in very nice hotels where they will do all the cooking for you and you don't have to empty your own bog.

I do feel it is about time caravaners explained themselves...

"The web equivalent of a dung salesman"

That is my description for these self-taught cowboys who roam around generating business for themselves and charging not inconsiderable amounts of money for what can only be described as a steaming pile of web excrement.

I shan't name people... but you can find examples for yourselves if you simply look for small business websites. As these companies are small, they often don't have a web presence and make themselves easy prey to these gobshites who manage to swindle some cash out of them for next to nothing.

Common indicators of this phenomenon are:

• splash pages - in some cases, it is fine... one of my own uses a splash page, but it has a purpose. www.mangetout.co.uk has two shops in close proximity and you'll want the right one. Whereas, the webshites will often learn a new trick and use it every time they create a site. One I am aware of does this for every site he has built. And... worse than using a splash page unnecessarily is the fact they look crap. If you're gonna make a splash page, at least make sure it serves its purpose - in this case, aesthetics.
• visit counter - why?! WHY!?! Who gives a toss if they are the 5000th visitor or the 5th? WHO CARES?! It's one of the easiest and quickest ways of making your site look completely amateur - which is why it is a prime indicator of shitness.
• today's date - cos we don't have enough things around us telling us the date. Desktop calendar - check. Wall calendar (dogs) - check. Computer desktop - check. Watch - check. Phone - check. Diary - check. Who honestly needs today's date on a webpage? Admittedly, a lot of bigger sites do this too. Commonly, news sites... but that has a purpose too. Not so for a simple presence website. Idiots.
• "This page was last updated on..." - the quickest way of making your site look dated. Okay, if you have a page that it is important to keep up to date or for people to tell if it was updated since their last visit, fine. But that's not particularly necessary on small business/organisation websites with lots of static content. All it does is make your site look feeble and unwanted by the lack of attention lavished upon it by its author. There is nothing worse than going on a site and seeing that a page was last updated five years ago. Worse, I suppose, is going to see a page that looks like it was designed five years ago and was only updated yestesrday... that's common on these scheister sites too.
• Badly cut/rendered graphics - one example of a site that was ironically pinched from us shows this perfectly - we had made a Flash intro for this unnamed site... it shows a few silhouettes of children doing various activities in an animated way... the new 'designer' chose to badly cut out the children individually and staple them back together into the header of each page on the site - not only that, but he didn't bother to recreate the header text at all and simply cut that out of the previous header too, so a mishmash of the worst of everything right there.

There are many, many more I could list - but these are the most obvious and the ones I pick up on most often. I could go into much more detail on every small crime these bedroom designers commit - but then, I commit enough of my own sometimes. I have a decent excuse though. I'm often in a rush or I am too lazy. They have none. They think what they do is cutting edge and awesome. But perhaps that's the problem. So do the muppets that they con out of their cash... I honestly wonder whether some people actually have full use of either their eyes or brain when they see examples of these people's work. They can't honestly think they're getting value for money.

The temptation to simply build up a list of all the businesses with crap websites and mail them a proposal for redesign is FAR too tempting. It's a pity that I am far too busy/lazy to do it. I'm sure that I'd nail one out of every five for a job... making it a pretty penny to earn. I do have the banker that I have a few jobs lined up for myself, which is nice... but if things get tight, I'll be knocking on some virtual doors and informing these businesses that they've been conned right and proper.

www.webpagesthatsuck.com/