DAT203: How not to design a website, and the future of the iPad

In today's practical, we've had to pick two of the world's worst-designed websites, and we managed to come up with these examples: alexchiu.com and the official Space Jam film website at www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/jam.htm. alexchiu.com featured a rather inconsistent design theme, a profusion of formatting and spelling errors, and a heavy reliance on animated GIFs to add emphasis on links and certain titles. Also, we found out that when we click on a different language, the design of the website is completely different, rather than having the same design throughout, which is supposed to be the convention no matter what language is used.

Although the official Space Jam website was designed sometime in October or early November 1996 (which was approximately about a month or two before CSS existed, and before CSS became the norm), it featured many bad design features. The website used repeating backgrounds, inconsistent text, frames as title bars (which can cause confusion as the user cannot tell whether or not the logo at the top left actually is the button that returns to the home page of the website),  usage of the frame as a menu bar, and clashing colour schemes in certain pages, thereby rendering the text hard to read. We also found validation errors and spelling mistakes after we ran the Space Jam website through an online validator, so, even though it is almost an online 'museum' page, someone at Warner Brothers didn't really pay attention to ensuring that the website at least complies with W3C standards at the time and didn't think about the many little spelling errors that the website had. Even some of Disney's older websites had more of a consistent theme, at least.

Now, on to a different subject. We had a debate about how the hypothetical iPad 5 would evolve, and how it would eventually render conventional computers (desktops and laptops) obsolete. There is evidence that mobile devices are starting to overtake conventional computers in terms of sales, and with the proliferation of cloud computing, it could eventually replace the need to sync the device with a conventional computer. According to the IDC, an independent technology research firm (source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9199918/In_historic_shift_smartphones_tablets_to_overtake_PCs), they are, indeed, outnumbering conventional computers, and even though they are already ahead of performance, the evolution of mobile technology is starting to make mobile devices outperform desktops and laptops in terms of speed, and eventually, they would be just as fast that even the most graphically-intense task could one day be performed on mobile devices such as the hypothetical iPad 5, or even its successor.