I’ve been pointed towards Bikeoff a couple of times now. ‘An initiative of the Design Against Crime Research Centre’, and based at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, it’s a laudable venture, and I’m looking forward to reading into it in much more detail. Bikeoff TV in particular looks like a nice Google maps / Flash video project.
However, at least superficially, I really do have to slate the design - especially given the extensive list of design personnel listed on the about page. Here’s what I think’s wrong:
- Table-based design - in this day and age there really is NO reason to be laying out a website using tables. Tables are for tabular data. End of story.
- The bubbles around the chunks of content does work alongside the colour-coding to make it easier to separate bits of information - but it still feels cluttered.
- As used (in)famously and stubbornly by Jakob Nielsen, that hyperlink blue is the blue that browsers colour link text by default. In this case, Bikeoff just hasn’t got round to styling its links in the CSS. It looks pretty bad.
Thanks for the comments about the Bikeoff blog, do you have any further comments on the design resource section of the website? Please email us with your comments with the email on the bottom of the page.
Thanks The Bikeoff Team
Happy to provide more feedback.
I’ve checked out the Design Resource section, and I like it - it’s well structured, the colour-coding is easier on the eye than on the home page, and the quicktime videos are great. My reservations about table-based design still stand however - although there is some more up-to-date CSS design happening on these pages as well.
I have to say I’m not a fan of the image map. It’s quite hard to read. Also Google will only see this as an image, and will not be able to read the links. Have a look at the page source on this one - http://www.pirateproductions.co.uk/ - which uses hidden spans and title attributes to add text content to the page.
You might want to look at your menu system as well. The top one (Design Resource / BikeOff TV etc.) has an odd effect when the menu item is highlighted (in Firefox/Safari for Mac). Also the drop-down sub menu in Design Resource (About Bike Theft etc.) isn’t working properly - sometimes the mouseover state triggers the drop down, sometimes not. There’s a neat solution that is more accessible and CSS-based, which I have implemented on other sites: the Son of Suckerfish (http://htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/).