Monday, September 17, 2007

Buchanan Border Collies

www.buchananbordercollies.com

Oh man, you guys, this is my favorite bad-design site of all time. Listen, border collie people are very nice, and the dog we got from them is the best dog on this planet but there's a reason they're not web-design people, and that reason is because they are dog people instead.

  • Intended Audience
Anyone interested in buying a pure-bred, ranch-raised, low-key border collie. The general public, really, which includes the broad spectrum of Web expertise--though the fact that by finding this website in the first place you are identifying as a web user of at least a certain degree of savviness.

  • Usefulness of Content
All the things you really need to know are there: how many dogs were in the most recent litter; their pedigree, pattern, and cost; information about health care and references; where the ranch is; how the dogs are raised and bred; generally what kind of an outfit BBC is. The photos on the site verify the dogs are all working dogs and agility-trainable, which is information a potential customer is probably looking for.

  • Consistency of Design
Well, I guess you could say they're consistent: consistently a mess. This is truly incredible, you guys. It's hard to say it's consistently designed, but eventually you figure out how it works, which leads into

  • Ease of Navigation
What you eventually figure out is this: everything that you might otherwise look for in a menu has its own link on a parent page; things that you think might be found on a subpage are, no, all there in a list on the front page; each hyperlink describes exactly what it links to--really, it starts to make a strange, berserk-design kind of sense. Except, in 10 colors.

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